White of Feather, Black of Heart
by el ma iubit
Summary: Do you believe in magic? A hundred years ago, a false king stole the throne of Illea and he rules there still, having aged not a day. A small band of young revolutionaries, some with powers and some with only their wits are given their most impossible task yet: to infiltrate the palace and kill the king. And throughout it all, the final Selection rages on.
1. Chapter 1

_I am only an old woodsman, whispering a sob,_  
 _As I steal like a spring-shadow down the Winding River._  
 _Since the palaces ashore are sealed by a thousand gates -_  
 _Fine willows, new rushes, for whom are you so green?_  
 **Du Fu**

* * *

The king appeared on the balcony for only the briefest second to wave to the crowd: there and then gone again. He was not an old man: with pale blonde hair and a long, leonine face, it was easy to see why he was still deemed handsome by the general populace.

There were whispers that he was immortal - that he kept a girl with rose petals for hair in a glass coffin in the palace and once a year she erased all the age from his face, from his body, from his mind, wiped him clean and left him hale and hearty once more.

These were, of course, merely whispers. Rumours. Nothing more.

Rumours rarely were

His son was at his shoulder. His Selection had just been announced. He looked like his father - golden hair and darker eyes, a face that could have been carved from stone. An unkindness to his eyes. You would have to be unkind, to preside over something as bloody as the Selection.

The queen was, as usual, absent.

The crown prince raised a hand to wave, and fireworks shattered the night sky into a thousand glittering fragments. The king disappeared back into the palace.

He was right to be afraid. From the depths of the crowd below, a dark-haired man closed his hand over his cane and considered just how easy it would have been to kill the king.

Too easy.

He wouldn't have to wait long.

* * *

He found her in the usual manner one finds the devil's daughter: playing liar's dice in a circle with leathery-faced women and men broad in both shoulder and belly, cheering on a small crimson cube as it bounced about in the dirt. He didn't have to ask which one she was. She had the look of a girl who drowned her mornings in medovukha and her evenings in tarasun, a girl who smiled with sharp yellow teeth that had she had taken from the carcasses of wolves. A true revolutionary.

Yegor wasn't accustomed to jobs like these. Before the last purge, they had people to do this for him, people to relay messages and find things and speak to strangers, to pass secrets along the coast until they reached him once more. One of the paramount rules of rebellion: the less you know, the less you can give up. He had only ever met a handful of other insurgents. It was an uncomfortable, bare feeling to stand in the sunlight and address one of his own comrades face to face.

He said, "Kasha?"

"Piss off," the girl said. She was chewing on a hangnail watching the die bounce in the dust. Her bare brown arms, folded on her knees, were braceleted with jagged, deep scars papered at the edges with rusty infection. Chittagong tattoos, they called them.

"I was told to find you." He adjusted his collar, nonchalant. The shipbreakers all wore dirty, torn clothes, tank tops that left bruised arms bare, brown felt jackets from which butane torches hung, bandanas to hold back hair and plastic guards to save their forearms from the worst of the damage that came from tearing oil tankers apart with their bare hands. Yegor wore a brown coat and the kind of waistcoat you could hide a gun in.

She squinted at him. He had to stop himself from recoiling. She had one dark eye; the other was filmed with white, staring into space, a long black mark extending across her face in either direction. She was one of the Fabulists – the pretty girls who took kitchen knives and hot pokers to their own faces rather than be taken into the Selection.

"Were you," she said, and accepted the bundle of notes that the nearest cutter handed to her, tucking them into her pocket, before she rose from her crouch and stepped forward to take his arm. "Now, who told you that?" Her hand cupped his elbow as she steered him towards the sun – she had long, thin fingers like the limbs of a spider. The pads of her fingertips were as rough as sandpaper.

"It's December," he said, and Kasha's dark eye seemed to glitter. "It's time to wake Levi up."

"At last," she said. She had a voice like she had inhaled smoke as a child and had spent her entire life trying to cough it out again – low and husky. "And you are – "

She paused, and arched a thick dark eyebrow. "Unnecessary," she answered herself.

"This mission will take everyone," he said, and she looked sceptical. "Me included. Wake him up."

His sergeant had neglected to explain to him precisely why this Kasha was the only person Levi Fallon entrusted with the secret of his hiding place, but that was the circumstances. She didn't seem inclined to play nice.

"Storm's brewing," Kasha said. The sky behind her was clear and blue as mertensia. "It'll be tomorrow before…"

"Do it. I don't care how."

She tapped a fingernail on his lower lip. "Careful," she said, and he remembered what she had done to her own face to save her life and did not doubt she was capable of inflicting far more on him if she deigned to turn her hand towards that task. She smiled.

"My name is Yegor Corbeau," he said, and her smile faded as quickly as it had appeared and her hand dropped as quick as she had raised it.

Nice to know the name still meant something.

Kasha was looked at him with thinly veiled apprehension now, like she was expecting him to move suddenly. "I'll wake him up," she said. "And tell him to meet you..."

"In Honduragua."

She paused. "So this is a recruitment drive. You're going to do it."

He nodded.

"Choose your pieces wisely," she said softly. "And long live the king."


	2. Chapter 2

_The world has forgotten the true fountain of this teaching_  
 _And people enslave themselves to miracles and fables._  
 _I look for the simplest way to sow and reap my nature._  
 _Mosses add their climbing colour to the thick bamboo;_  
 _And now comes the sun, out of mist and fog,_  
 _And everything is gone from me, speech goes, and reading,_  
 _Leaving the single unison._

 **Liu Zhongyan**

* * *

The train shuddered its way across the tracks that ran through the spine of the nation that had been Illea, and Yegor adjusted his cuffs as he stepped into the next compartment.

He was dressed, as he was always dressed, flawlessly, with the formal, decorous mien of a man destined someday to be king.

He carried his cane with him, as he always carried his cane with him, accessorised with glimmering black cuff links, vaguely rakishly rookish in appearance, a starched white shirt and a suit that had either been tailored or stolen, so expensive the fabric. His shoes clicked, authoritatively.

He looked like his brother. He knew he looked like his brother. He looked like a _Corbeau_.

A New Asian man with shadowed eyes was asleep at one end of the carriage with his head cushioned from the rattle of the window by a balled-up khaki jacket, a small pale woman sipped a mug of cold tea in the seat closest to the dark-haired revolutionary, and there was naught but empty space in between. Yegor took the seat between them, sliding onto the hard wooden bench with the caution of a crow settling in to roost, and looked out the grimy half-window as the train slid and shook across the mountains at the edge of Zuni and towards the horizon of Honduragua.

Beneath the tracks of the train, rock gave way very suddenly to wide expanses of exactly nothing. The train threaded a path no wider than itself, prepared at anytime to lose its grip upon the track and plummet into the abyss below, as had happened to many before. Underneath, the mountains opened up into wide open canyons and crevasses, embroidered with strands of mist and fog, and beyond, the lights of Honduragua glowed dimly from far away, red and gold. Yegor had never liked Honduragua.

Too many rouge-cheeked girls standing on street corners offering fortune and fortunes, too many white-clad prophets selling letters to the dead, too many plague doctors with their arrays of potions and poisons lining the streets. Honduragua was a chaos of falsity and vanity; that which was real was useless, that which was false was tacky, and in between it all there was an unpleasant kind of seediness, the knowledge that despite the colour and action of the place any one of the people you passed on the street would sell you out for a single night's worth of _pisco_.

Yegor was fond of lying and betraying, but not of vice versa.

He had a little leather-bound book with him, but he only set it on the table and did not touch it. Yegor was content to wait. He always had been. That was what the Corbeaus did - they watched, and they waited.

Yegor was watching the king, now.

The Selection was beginning. All across the kingdom of Illea, the girls would be chosen - the beautiful, the charming, the gifted. Sometimes the Fabulist's mutilations weren't enough. Sometimes they got taken too.

Kasha would be safe. She had been beautiful, once, but she was far from charming, gifted only in that esoteric art of arson, so what would the Selection want with her? It was the other revolutionary girls he had to concern him with, those made beautiful with their passion, with the fire in their heart and the stars in their eyes and the rose-tint over their vision, those who believed, innocently, that the world could still be saved from the scourge, those would be the ones to be taken, those would be the ones lost to the Selection.

The final Selection.

If everything went according to plan.

The train shrieked its warning as it slid into the tiny wooden platform they called a border station, and the small blonde woman who had been drinking tea rose with the grace of an albatross, as though she had no need for something as human and mundane as embalance/em, and moved towards the door of the train as the enormous freighter ground to a sudden stop. She was, Yegor had noticed, clad in the red and grey uniform of a soldier - ixora and charcoal, a fire dying down to embers. War colours. The border wardens, the guards, the patrols, wore navy like ceratostigma, darkening in colour the more vital their tasks became.

The Selection watchmen, though, always wore gold and silver and white. Mourning colours.

The small soldier woman stepped off the train, and the door swung shut behind her, and Yegor wondered what poor devil, what poor soul, would suffer from her arrival in their town, here at the edge of the world. Whose home would burn tonight?

He waited until she had left the carriage, until she had disappeared from the wooden platform at the edge of eternity, until she had vanished once more into the mountains, until the train had started up its slow, ominous shudder towards the city once more. Yegor was content to wait.

Then, once the train had picked up speed and was once more defying all the laws of magic an physics that said it should not possibly be going as fast as it was going along as narrow a train track as it was going along, he stood. He had to admire the soldier - it was difficult to make movement along this car look effortless, so sudden and jolting were the turns and adjustments as it navigated the iron path through the mountains, and he was not entirely certain he accomplished that feat. Nonetheless, he approached the sleeping man.

Words, spoken quietly: "I could have sworn I told that arsonist to wake you up, and yet here you lie, dreaming."

A pause.

And then, a reluctant reply -

"I'm awake," the New Asian man said, without opening his eyes. His hair was the dark of something precious burned beyond salvage. He hadn't shaved in a few days. His cheekbones were sharp enough to draw blood.

"Kasha was as good as her word, then. Consider my suspicions aroused."

Levi Fallon might have smiled, had he been another man and this another time, but instead he just straightened himself and opened his eyes.

Yegor almost wished he had kept them shut. There was a certain degree of danger in those eyes - but then, Levi was handsome, and dangerously so, the kind of beautiful and destructive that made a voice in your head whisper that maybe self-immolation wasn't such a bad idea after all. Yegor had kissed boys like that before, and girls too, with lips like pomengranate seeds and smiles like scalpels. They always tasted of wine and gunpowder.

Levi had worn red and grey not so long ago, had worn it until the red was not dye but blood and the grey was not thread but bone-ash. That made for a good soldier, but perhaps not for a good ally.

He could not help but think about what Kasha had said about choosing his pieces carefully. Well, it wasn't like he had a wide choice to work with. This wasn't exactly the Selection.

Another man would have asked Yegor about the plan. Levi did not. He knew better. A silver ring hung and spun lazily in the hollow of his throat as he shifted his weight in the seat, silent.

Yegor placed the little leather book in front of his new soldier. Levi looked at it, but did not touch it. Yegor said, "Her name is Minette. This is her first time in Honduragua - show her the sights. Take a long walk back to the meeting place. You know the address."

He did not bother to say goodbye to Levi, nor Levi to him. Yegor departed the train at the border, and watched the train collide with the horzon, disappearing towards the capital city of the province. He stood there, well after the train had faded from view, and watched a murder gather overhead.

He still had people to shanghai, deliveries to arrange, observations to make, routes to trace, plots to plan and plans to plot. An assassination was no simple feat. Even getting close to the king was a dream, an impossibility. They would have to be ghosts, wraiths, to even catch a glimpse.

But Yegor had faith - not in his team, but in himself.

He was, after all, a Corbeau. They were content to wait.


	3. Chapter 3

_Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal_  
 _the way you dream, the things you feel._  
 _Deep in your spirit let them rise_  
 _akin to stars in crystal skies_  
 _that set before the night is blurred:_  
 _delight in them and speak no word._  
 _How can a heart expression find?_  
 _How should another know your mind?_  
 _A thought once uttered is untrue._  
 _Live in your inner self alone, for_  
 _within your soul a world has grown,_  
 _the magic of veiled thoughts that might_  
 _be blinded by the outer light,_  
 _drowned in the noise of day, unheard..._  
 _take in their song and speak no word._

 **Fedor Tyutchev**

* * *

The mask she wore today was pretty, of that there was no denying. The cheekbones were hollow, the skin smooth and bronze, the hair silky and dark, lightless. Angular eyes, like a fox, and very sharp cuspids, like little serrated daggers, made the visage look very slightly frightening - almost threatening, without meaning to be so.

She didn't like it.

But.

The unfamiliar girl looked back at Minette from the train station mirror, and when she tried a smile, her reflection seemed unwilling to cooperate. It was still her, beneath the veil of Other, was still Minette Chastain and her fear and her uncertainty and her wavering, unwilling caution.

There was still time to turn back. Whatever lay ahead of her could get her killed, she knew that, a wrong word or a step out of place or even a dash of bad luck could leave her blue-lipped in the river or with an arrow in her back, but she didn't have to face that: she could still change her mind, change this mask for an anonymous one, and slip back into the background hum of the world, allow the revolution rage without her, let Yegor find some other doll to play the parts he scripted, let them fight and bleed and die without her...

...and the knowledge that she could do that, but wouldn't - the knowledge that she was choosing this path-less-travelled, willingly so - was enough to carry her away from the mirror and out the door and towards the street, absently brushing down the dark navy fabric of her dress, leaving the stars imprinted there undulating and flickering in the dim light of the dusk drawing down.

Yegor had told her only the minimum needed to identify her rebel contact, which left her feeling rather as though she were in a pit of snakes and trying to pick out from intuition alone how to identify those that would bite and draw blood, and those that would bite and rot with venom. And now she glanced askance at those pushing past her, in the street, those sitting on low concrete walls beside the station waiting for a train, those browsing and bickering and bartering at the street-side stalls, for the sparse details Corbeau had offered her.

She didn't have to search for very long. It wasn't hard to spot the man, as it turned out. He was sitting at a table outside one of the many cafes lining the alley perpendicular to Station Road, a black boot propped up on one knee, lazily turning pages in a small leather book imprinted with small New Asian characters: 大灰狼. He wore a soldier's coat. Blood stained one cuff.

He wasn't looking at Minette as she changed course towards him, flicking open the silk fan she had concealed in the sleeve of her dress and fanning away the moths and midges that darted to bite at her exposed skin while she moved to sit at the chair opposite him. He didn't look up for a long moment. Turned another page.

She studied him, silently, for a moment - unshaven and shadow-eyed, like he was in dire need of sleep or just after waking, dark charcoal hair and eyes that were-not-quite-black. Beautiful, in the same way that a fire was beautiful.

She said, perhaps a little too softly for him to hear, like the words had withered into dust even as the syllables settled between her teeth, " _My crown is in my heart, not on my head; not deck'd with Indian stones-_ "

" _Diamonds_."

She blinked, unfamiliar coal lashes brushing against unfamiliar high cheekbones.

"I'm sorry?"

" _Not deck'd with diamonds,_ " the man said again. " _Not deck'd with Diamonds, and Indian stones: Nor to be seen._ Yegor never seems to get that right. I don't think he actually likes the play very much." He shut his book, and offered her the second half, addressing his teacup rather than her face. He said: "My crown is call'd content - a crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy."

He glanced up at her for the first time and Minette was taken aback by the sheer look of disgust that flickered across his face as he caught sight of her. She could not deny it - she was accustomed to having looks like that thrown at her, from people on the streets, from those she had to interact with, even from those members of the revolution who had not been warned of her particular condition, but she had a mask on, didn't she? A beautiful one, at that - and yet, Levi looked away from her, a tendon in his jaw moving slightly, like her appearance had personally offended him. That left her feeling uncomfortably like he could see beneath, through the layer of the mask, to the face and the burns and the ugliness below, and the fact he reacted to could not but make her angry.

"Listen," she said, but before she could finish her sentence he had risen from his seat and tucked the book into his jacket, his face unreadable, his eyes dark. He picked up the umbrella he had left under the table, and flicked it open, shaking away stray droplets of water, before he silently offered her his arm. Uncertainly, Minette rose also and took it. Neither of them spoke. She wasn't sure what she would say if she could.

They started their walk down the street. He was tall, lean - beside him, the slender, elegant Minette felt almost delicate, but they touched each other so lightly as to not touch one another at all. Her fingers ghosted against the fabric of his sleeve - they walked side by side, but maintaining a single inch between them so they did not touch. It must, she thought, resemble a particularly stilted, cold courtship. She kept her fan waving gently, just to give her hands something to do.

They turned onto a street lined with shops and long, clear windows, and Minette could not help but pause and gaze into each store as they passed, an odd kind of fascination fluttering behind her breast, a hummingbird trapped beneath her ribs, at the mannequins and empty-eyed masks and silk-diamond-lace dripping dresses that filled each display. All of the colours in the world were represented here - and as she watched, a mannequin in the shape of a faceless girl unfolded herself abruptly from her ballerina pose and moved quickly towards the window as though to grab at Minette, leaping at the glass.

Minette jerked back abruptly as the mannequin landed short and leaned back, looking pleased without a face or mouth or eyebrows to express it. She turned back towards her position, and was still once more. A tacky illusion, but one that left Minette no more settled than she had been.

She took Levi's arm again, and they continued. At the end of this road was a little stone bridge, augmented by wooden struts spanning the narrow width of a silver thread of river winding its way through the city's Old Town, separating seedy from dilapidated, unsavoury from ruinous. On either side of the river, trees were growing, slender and tall, of differing colours each side of the river - New Town had pink and white cherry blossoms, in bloom despite the wintery bite to the air and the late hour of the season, while Old Town glowed with the ghostly skeletons of hydrangea bushes dripping only the flowers, absent leaf or greenery.

Minette put unfamiliar brown hands against the wall of the bridge and leaned forward to peer into the dark water beneath. The girl who looked back from the water was pale and blonde, a round face and big blue eyes, and Minette refocused her attention on the mask she wore, pulling all of the threads together more tightly so they coalesced more smoothly, until not even her reflection knew the truth.

She looked back to Levi. "Where are we going?"

He was silent for a moment - she didn't think he was going to answer for a long, drawn-out second, and then he said, quite simply, "Safe house in Old Town."

The masked girl paused, and observed him for another moment. He was studiously keeping his gaze away from her, towards the other side of the bridge, but she had a feeling that the second she allowed her eyes to stray he would be watching her once more. Was her ugliness such a fascination?

She had heard much about this man. She respected him - she knew better than not to. And she knew he had some reason to act as he did: a team assembled by Yegor Corbeau would doubtless be unlacking in iniquities and vices, some more deadly than others. Maybe she could learn a thing or two from this lone wolf act of his.

The night was falling, but gradually, almost reluctantly, dying the sky slowly grey and dousing the streets in gauzy gasoline ghostlight as they moved the rest of the way across the bridge. Here, the shops were empty, those that still had whole windows, of course. Instead, each alley was crowded with people, their stalls, their little wooden boxes upon which they displayed yellowed envelopes containing the name of your true love and ice flowers that would never melt, candles that would never die, and vials of poison to craft and change and destroy and burn. Lilting voices called out across the streets, in languages familiar and not-so.

"Are we in a hurry?" Minette asked Levi.

"The opposite," he said, quite honestly. She didn't like that. Associates of Yegor Corbeau had no business being honest.

Nonetheless, she approached the nearest stall, piled high with little music boxes, some coloured pastel and pale like little cakes and others crafted of a rich wood, fretted with gold and bronze around the edges. They had little keys to match, small golden ones and long silver ones, each unique and engraved with little letters too fine and tiny to discern in the dim light. The narrow-faced man running the stall saw Minette looking, as called over to her, "The voices of those you have forgotten, and songs you have never heard outside of your dreams! A true piece of wondrous magic - try it for yourself!"

Minette laughed, a sweet sound, and thanked him, and choose a key after some musing - a small, iron shape no longer than her pinkie finger. It matched a small wooden box, and she set the key into it and wound it, carefully, until she could wind it no more. Than she gently lifted the lid of the box, and waited - and a song poured out of it, impossibly beautiful: a woman's voice, low and husky, mournfully, liltingly so -

"... _yī zhǐ dúláng, yī zhǐ dúshé, ài jiéchéng, dào jiéchéng_..."

Levi pushed the box closed. "I don't think that's yours," he said, but his voice was not unkind. He looked tired, but not angry - his hands were surprisingly light, almost gentle, as he moved them back across the table for a moment and at length made a slightly different selection. He offered a different key - wrought, elegant and golden, and indicated the music box to which it belonged. Minette looked at him, uncertain, but accepted this new key, and tried again.

He was right. The voice that came out this time was gentle, sweet and soft, and hers. Her mother's voice, just the hum of it - low and wordless, like Minette was lying in bed at night and catching only the mere sound of her parents speaking downstairs, the rise and fall of meaningless words.

Only four years. It had been longer, hadn't it - the illness had wasted her mother's body first, and then her voice, then even her eyes, but never, never, her mind, her heart. How long ago that seemed! Had she forgotten the sound of her mother's voice so soon? And yet it was unfamiliar, blissfully so, like rediscovering what the night sky looked like, like seeing a sunrise for the first time after a thousand years of darkness. Her mother's voice slowly faded and then surged back to life, a laugh, and she heard, quite clearly, the words:

" _How kind heaven is, to let me speak to you again, my dear daughter._ "

And then, silence again - the music box had spoken its piece. Minette reverently closed it again, very gently moving her hands across its golden surface, and looked at the narrow-faced man.

"How much?"

She would have paid any price, but that, it soon transpired, was hardly necessary. The man at the stall seemed a little taken aback at how eager she was to part with her money, and they parted ways equally content, Minette with the box clasped in her hands, her arm looped rather lazily through Levi's. She could care less how unhappy he seemed at the situation - her arm settled upon his rather than remaining distinct.

"Thank you," she said.

"Thank you?"

"For showing me," she said. "I might never have found it otherwise."

She smiled at him, and he seemed rather ill at ease, and looked away once more. He would have to get over it. Minette had a suspicious inkling that killing the king would take some time, and they would probably have to spend rather a while together as an unfortunate result. He would grow accustomed to her unmasked face.

Her curiosity was like a splinter lodged in the strings of her heart, pushing her to ask with every step she took. She said, "if it didn't belong to me, who did that song belong to?"

The corner of Levi's mouth curled, whether in pleasure or displeasure, she could not tell in the dim evening light. Overhead, a gasoline lamp was spitting into life; grey fog swallowing them was turned slowly silver by its wan light. He said, "Whose face are you wearing?"

Minette had not considered that. Did it make sense? She thought so. If she could confuse even her own reflection, it seemed unsurprising that she might unsettle a piece of cheap magic such as those music boxes. But even as she thought those words, she wanted to swallow them back again.

Her mother's voice was hardly cheap magic.

"I don't know," she admitted, "Yegor gave it to me - I don't know why."

But Yegor always had reason for doing as he did.

Levi made a noncommital sound under his breath, and they followed the winding street around a final corner. The voices of the night market had drawn faint behind them, the strains of music indistinct, and Minette didn't have to ask which building they were approaching because wasn't it obvious? It was a peculiar shade of verdigris, that blue-green burnish of faded copper, and three large, tall wooden doors set into the face of it, overshadowed by balconies with wrought iron railings framed by high, narrow arches fretted with delicate plaster artwork. The doors were rotting, scraped away at the bottom where they had encountered the cobblestones too many times over too many years, and the window nearest Minette had a small fracture wound in it, cracks spiralling away from a perfect circular hole that looked as though it had been shot there. It was an old, decrepit building and she rather loved it.

There was a dark haired woman outside with pale olive skin, looking rather recalcitrant, as she held a lamp aloft, its silvered light spilling across the street as they approached. She was sitting on an overturned wooden box, her boots trailing loose laces, and seemed to have been peeling a red, red apple with a very sharp silver knife before they arrived - they lay in her lap still, glittering with the faint undercurrent of a half-promised threat. Minette didn't have to ask the identity of this woman. Yegor's right-hand woman was easily recognised, and just as easily mistrusted: his stalwart, his defender, his tame wolf, and to some unkinder tongues, his myrmidon.

"By heaven," Taja Sweeney said. " _By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon_."

She looked expectantly at the pair but Levi moved free of Minette's arm and simply said, "If you're waiting for her to quote Shakespeare correctly, you'll be waiting a while."

He shut his umbrella with a snap and disappeared into the building, leaving behind only the sound of his boots upon the steps as he walked up to the rebellion's little last sanctuary, the rotten rooms from which they would plan how to kill the false king.

" _Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, and pluck up drowned honour by the locks_."

Taja Sweeney looked at Minette with one eyebrow arched, looking slightly impressed, and even more slightly amused at the girl's mutinous expression.

"I do," Minette said. "Know it."

"You do," Taja agreed, unsmiling.

Looking in the direction Fallon had gone, Minette said, uncertainly, "I don't know what I've..."

"Haven't looked in a mirror, have you?" Taja said, and set her lamp down again. "Yegor's sense of humour isn't appreciated by all, it must be said."

Sense of humour? Minette's eyes flashed, and she snapped, "This was some kind of joke?"

"It was a test," Sweeney replied, just as quickly. "Yegor is right to be cautious."

"I don't need to be tested, I've proven myself as loyal as any of you..."

"Which is hardly loyal at all," a voice said from behind her. Speak of the devil, and he shall appear, and the devil in question was approaching them, cane clicking against the cobblestones like a deathwatch beetle counting down the seconds to disaster - Yegor Corbeau himself, looking somehow at home in the mist and smog that wreathed him. "Present company excepted, of course," he continued, his voice like crushed velvet, as he glanced at Taja. Taja's smile was very bright, and very white, in response. Yegor said, rather lazily, "Where's Levi?"

"Upstairs," Taja said. "Probably looking for liquor..."

"We'll need his help to carry her upstairs," Yegor said, and before Minette had time to flinch in anticipation of some violence against her, the air beside the dark-haired revolutionary flickered and wavered like a heat haze, and then the sharp lines of the buildings blurred like they were being erased, as though they had been drawn on, covering something that had been painted there before.

A girl flickered into being beside him - no, Minette corrected herself, two girls appeared. One was holding the other up, and struggling with the endeavour - a small blonde with an unhappy smile and a lean red-haired figure with pain etched on her features and broken cuffs on her wrists. "The prison break went as well as could be expected," Yegor said. "Which means it didn't go well at all. Taja, darling, we're going to need a pot of tea, some bandages, and somewhere to put the bullets."

* * *

He could see some of the Selected flickering in front of the window, like moths in a clear jar fluttering gauzy wings against the glass, ignorant of the impossible, invisible magic that kept them there.

Like butterflies in a box, beautiful and thousand-colored, realizing very slowly that air holes had not been provided.

They had arrived gradually over the course of the last few days, as they were pulled from their homes, from their families, from wherever they had called safe, to dwell in poisonous gardens and gilded, golden cages. And they did indeed flicker - were there, and were gone. Beautiful, of course. They always were. Despite the fear on their faces, the pain in their eyes, they were falling stars who knew their fate and found themselves shining all the same.

No. They were burning. Very, very slowly.

And they knew it, too.

Well, fire had a habit of catching.

The palace would burn soon enough.

If Oliver Tyrrell had been given his way, it would be nothing but ashes right now, but the devil Corbeau worked in mysterious ways, and still the castle stood, and sometimes it seemed as though it always would.

Yegor Corbeau was infinitely patient, Oliver Tyrrell only very slightly less so, and so he had stayed here, and waited, and watched, just as the revolution asked him to. Having charmed his way with silver and honeyed words to this vantage point, he had silently observed the Selection unfold, and wondered precisely when Yegor was going to strike.

Would he really let these girls die rather than begin his game of chess a little prematurely?

The doors to the palace opened slowly, allowing a little of the light and shadows within to spill out and play upon the stone balcony upon which his gaze was fixed, and he wondered exactly what was going on. People said that before the tyrant Xisuthros had stolen the crown and the throne and all they carried, the Selection had been televised, and every household in the kingdom invited to watch and marvel at proceedings. Certainly that was the case no longer - the Selection swallowed girls whole now.

Adelaide.

He could not imagine it was a pleasant process at all.

One of the girls appeared for the briefest moment, silhouetted against the gold and silver light of the ballroom within, no more distinct than a shadow - her face, her eyes, indistinguishable from the darkness. She was like something very breakable made out of porcelain, her hair raven, and her lips red indeed. She was not looking towards Oliver, nor at the ballroom, nor even at the stars - but at the darkness beyond the balcony.

Something told Oliver she was thinking about jumping. That would be one way for a star to fall. He doubted she would be the first to try it, or the last, or that the king would permit that simple motion allow her to escape his clutches if he did not wish for it to be so.

Oliver returned his eye to the little spyglass in his hand.

She wavered.

He waited for her to jump.

And then, very suddenly, all the glowing lights of the palace died, submerging everything into lightlessness, and the girl was lost to the dark.

* * *

 **I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Thank you to those who have submitted, or are planning to submit, and espeically to those who left a review on the last chapter! It means a lot to me that you took the time to give me your opinion.**

 **Please don't hesitate to leave a review - I'd love to hear from you, whether that's your thoughts on the plot, the characters, the writing, the pinterest...! Constructive criticism is not only accepted but encouraged and welcomed. What do you want to happen, what do you think will happen, is that the same thing?**


	4. Chapter 4

_Only to wanderers can come_

 _Ever new the shock of beauty,_

 _Of white cloud and red cloud dawning from the sea,_

 _Of spring in the wild-plum and river-willow..._

 _I watch a yellow oriole dart in the warm air,_

 _And a green water- plant reflected by the sun._

 _Suddenly an old song fills_

 _My heart with home, my eyes with tears._

 **Du Shenyan**

* * *

The prison that rose from the ground as though it had been carved from the very rock of the cliffs, hard and jagged and solid, was utterly without windows, without doors, without so much as a breath escaping it. Truth be told, from the outside it was difficult to discern that it was a building at all, so featureless was its façade – just smooth grey stone, and four sharp corners, a box of rock in which were held all the mad and bad Illea had to offer. Rarely were they held guests of his Majesty for long between arrest and execution – the gallows were well-frequented on this side of the world.

Cappie had laughed when Yegor asked her if she could find a way in.

Of course a ghost could find a way in.

Who did he think she was?

She was Cappie Achterkamp.

His gloved hand was quite large compared to hers, which was bare, fingernails uneven and speckled with chipped pastel polish in the national colours, a pale yellow approximating the deep golden hue of the Illean flag. When she spoke, she always addressed his collarbone. Cappie was small and somehow perpetually seemed smaller, as though each time she faded from this world she came back somewhat incomplete, having lost something intangible between whatever was _here_ and wherever _there_ was. Yegor wasn't quite accustomed to being larger than other people - even Taja was within an inch of his height.

Men like Yegor didn't need to be tall. He didn't think he liked the feeling.

Cappie took a light step forward, cautious rather than uncertain, and breathed cold ghostlight before her as she stared down the tunnel. It led, one presumed, into the ground beneath the prison; after about a metre, it disappeared into dense darkness, so one could not be entirely certain. Underfoot, the soil was smooth and undisturbed – look closer still, and it was unnaturally so. "Are you sure?"

Of course Yegor was sure. Oh, the devil's daughter was wrong plenty, at least according to those unfortunate revolutionaries who had cause to speak to her more regularly than anyone was fully comfortable with, but Yegor had his suspicions that the arsonist was less inclined to making mistakes and more accustomed to allowing lies drip from her lips like wine. On this occasion, however, he thought she was probably familiar enough with the workings of prisons not to make a mistake, and wise enough not to lie to a man like Yegor Corbeau.

"Of course," he said, and Cappie looked at him with eyes heavy-lidded with wariness, but nodded and tightened her fingers over his, and all of the light began to drain from the world, colour by colour. Blue went first, at least for Yegor – suddenly the sky above him was ash and charcoal, and the air was very, very cold. Nothing retained its crisp edge when Cappie did her work – they faded and blurred, like the chaotic edge of a moving figure caught in a daguerreotype. A bird crossing the grey vastness overhead moved jerkily, flashing from one spot to another, less a shape than it was a blur with talons.

There were few kinds of magic that Yegor enjoyed. Cappie's particular brand of legerdemain was no exception. The world faded to nothingness.

She was a grey-gold mess beside him, the silhouette of a girl, all of her edges melting into the background, her shape apparent only when she moved as she moved now, towards the tunnel. "Ready?" she whispered, although it wasn't a whisper when all the world reverberated with it, and Yegor said nothing as they set off into the tunnel.

The tunnel had been devoid of light before, so there was little difference to be detected now. The guards of the prison needed some way to access the jail, of course, and he rather doubted they had traps planted along the path of their daily commute - but Yegor could not shake the rather unpleasant feeling that he was walking directly into a place he had done his best to avoid for the past twenty odd years, a fox aiming for the gin.

It was like walking into a world composed entirely of ink. Cappie was a shadow in front of him, their hands clasped tightly as though the sky itself might attempt to swallow one of them whole, and down they went beneath the world.

He could remember a poem that had started like this. Hadn't Orpheus lost the sky trying to reclaim a woman from certain death?

They walked.

They walked.

They walked.

"Shh," echoed Cappie's shadow, and they stopped walking.

A faint silvery ripple moved through the greyness to his left, a figure passing them in the corridor, and then Cappie darted off to the right and Yegor followed, and found himself believing that they were moving gradually upwards once more, into the heart of the prison. Another pause, to allow another shadow waver obliviously beside them. "Nearly there," the world said with Cappie's voice.

He could see the yellow on her nails again. The colour was leeching slowly back into the world, just as slowly as it had left him - yellow came first, the faint gold of Cappie's hair and the glow of dim, flickering lights overhead, and red came last, the blood on the floor and the fiery inferno of Andromeda's hair.

They had put Andromeda in a cage. Yegor hadn't expected anything else. She leaned against its bars, forearms crossed, posed lazily, carelessly, teeth bared in a laugh as she caught sight of Yegor. "Hello, captain," she said. "It's about time. You've kept me waiting."

"Well," he said. "You weren't needed until now."

Cappie moved towards the lock, her edges out of focus and hazy, like all of her colours hadn't returned yet, like she was still half in that grey, dark world. "Good to see you alive and well, Andie. I heard you were due for the squad tomorrow."

Andromeda's smirk lengthened, Cheshire-cat style. "Chopping block, actually," she said. "Shooting me would be too honourable. The guards want to see my head bounce."

Yegor knew that they weren't the only ones, and Cappie knew better than to dally in her picking of the lock, and Andromeda knew not to wait for Yegor to ask before she said, "It was a success, by the way. My mission."

Yegor did not look at her. He was watching the corridor. The place seemed empty - the cages as far as was visible in either direction were empty but for Andromeda's. There was only one path out of this labyrinth; a small door-shaped slit cut into the stone that formed the walls and floor and ceiling of this hollow hallway.

"I swear," Andromeda was saying to Cappie. "The gratitude the rebellion shows its footsoldiers is simply heartwarming, don't you think?"

Cappie looked as though she were about to reply when there was a _tock tock tock_ and she said, rather gleefully, "Got it! I think..."

"Cappie," Yegor said abruptly, and held out his hand. The younger girl looked rather taken aback but took it, and stretched her other to grasp Andromeda by the wrist.

"Give me a second," she said, and then, taken aback - "No. No. _No_."

The world retained its colours and its edges. Cappie dropped their hands to stare at her own, turning them over as though in search of some invisible cuffs or shackles which might have restricted her abilities, and then turned to watch the door with a fearful look.

"They're going to..."

" Achterkamp," Andromeda said urgently. "My cuffs."

"Yegor," Cappie said. "I'm sorry, I don't..."

" _Achterkamp_. If they're coming, I need to be able to fight -"

"Cappie," Yegor said. "Get Andromeda out." They would need to be quick.

They had been relying on slipping in and out, ghosts lost in a grey world, but that, it seemed, was no longer an option. Could they still escape? Probably. Could they escape undetected? Debatable. Would Andromeda enjoy stretching her limbs a little after so long cooped up? Almost certainly.

As Cappie worked at the lock, Andromeda looked at Yegor expectantly. "Do you have my spear?"

"No," he said. "I don't have your spear."

"For _fuck's_ sake, Corbeau..."

"Language," Yegor said mildly, and suddenly shadows were writ large upon the doorway - guards approaching. The gin had been baited; the trap had been sprung. "How are those shackles coming, Cappie?"

Her voice was tense. "I can't..."

"Hurry up," Andromeda snapped impatiently, and then there were voices approaching, fast, echoing and reverberating off the bare grey rock until the room was full of sound and noise and the red-haired warrior turned with a narrowing of her eyes towards the door.

"Leave it, Cappie - with me."

Yegor began to move back, away from the doorway, towards one of the empty cages, far enough down the corridor that when he stepped inside he would not be visible from Andromeda's. He held the little iron door open for Cappie, who gave him an uncertain look, but stepped inside gamely enough, her step ginger, her expression cautious, and then Yegor locked her in.

Andromeda was fuming when he returned to her. He reached her cage just as the guards reached the door, and he stepped in to join her little personal prison just as a bullet shrieked past him and flattened itself against the far wall. "What," Andromeda said tightly, trying to turn with her hands still shackled to the front of the cage, seeing Yegor move to the farthest corner of the cell and put his back against the wall. "Are you doing..."

Yegor gave her a smile. "If they want me," he said. "They have to go through you."

"I'm still cuffed," Andromeda said, rather unnecessarily. "There's five of them."

"Makes it fair, then."

Andromeda looked as if she would answer, but by then the guards were at the door and she was forced into quick, fluid motion by necessity - with both hands otherwise occupied, it required a little more creativity than Yegor thought she was probably accustomed to. As the first man entered, she swayed backwards a little, so that he would have to turn to reach at her and then rocketed forward to meet his nose with her forehead. "Unbelievable," she spat, blood that was not her own dripping from her teeth, and the second guard into the cage grabbed her throat and pinned her to the wall of the cell.

The third man was crossing the threshold. Yegor pulled his gun from his coat, and shot him twice - shoulder and cheek. The guards on _that_ side of the cage didn't dare loose their weapons for fear of hitting one of their own men - Yegor Corbeau had no such compunctions.

Andromeda had sunk her teeth into the hand of the man strangling her, furious and tenacious as a bulldog, and while he thrashed another of his comrades did his best to enter the fray. Here, then, was a man with magic to him - where he touched the bars of the cells they warped and bent underhand like clay beneath the fingers of a sculptor. He reached for Andromeda's face, and she brought her hands up, wrists facing outwards, to block him - his fingernails brushed the surface of the shackles and shattered them, and Andromeda thanked him for his helpfulness with a punch to the face so fast and so brutal Yegor heard bone break.

She turned her attention to the man she had bitten, just as he pulled his gun from his belt and shot her. She didn't make a sound, even as the blood began to spill; only caught the hand holding the gun and twisted him over her hip in a flip that snapped his wrist and brought him crashing to the ground. She wrested the gun from his hand and kicked him in the head until he stopped moving.

There was no sign of the fifth guard. Andromeda wiped blood from her mouth and then stared down at the crimson spread quickly across her chest. Yegor thought that the bullet had probably hit a rib, somewhere close to her shoulder.

He knew men who had died from less. And there would be more violence to come - they were, after all, still in a cage.

Andromeda closed her eyes and swore. "You were wrong," she said, her voice laced with pain.

Yegor wasn't accustomed to being wrong. He arched an eyebrow.

"It still wasn't fair," she said, rather defiantly, and he gave her another smile. It was not quite kind.

"Come on," he said. "We'd better let Cappie out of that cage."

* * *

Kasha had never found a bridge she didn't want to burn.

You burned the things you loved; that was how you survived. Kasha had learned that early, and she had learned that well. After a while you tired of the first part, so you didn't bother with the second. A girl could only swallow so much smoke.

Burn the things you love, lock your wrist when you punch, and never be too proud to run.

Kasha ran now. Screams in her hair and smoke in her throat as the town burned behind her, Kasha ran.

* * *

She was lost.

 _Corbeau._

"Someone call Nithya."

 _Demetrios._

She couldn't remember closing her eyes.

 _Anais._

Had she closed her eyes?

 _Darius._

"Taja." Yegor."Save your tears. We have to go."

 _Go go go go go go ..._

 _Go?_

Cappie. "Without me?"

 _Don't go_.

Andromeda tried to

 _Don't go._

spit with all

 _Don't go._

of her accustomed venom,.

 _Don't go._

but the sound came out

 _Don't go._

rather less harsh than she intended

 _Don't go._

as a bloodless, soundless sound.

 _Corbeau_.

Yegor again. "I don't need you. I need Taja."

 _Demetrios._

The devil spoke: "Keep her alive until I get back."

 _Demetrios. Anais. Darius. Corbeau. Motherfatherbrothersoldier._

And Andromeda was lost once more.

* * *

Mara Morosova was waiting, as promised, by the wrought-iron railing of the cemetery nearest where one river met another, her pale face bright as a meteorite despite the shadows cast by the oak foliage canvas overhead, her big eyes even bigger than usual. She was a fearless one, Mara, but this kind of a night - the air cold and full of nothing - could unsettle the bravest of bones in the steeliest of skins, and she was clearly not at her ease. She had picked a hole in the too-large cardigan that draped about a bird-like frame, and looked disinclined to act maganimous to either Yegor or Taja as the pair approached. Not that Taja could blame her - revolutionaries could be difficult to work with at the best of time.

True revolutionaries burnt their bridges, and learned to savour the taste of smoke on the air.

"Masha," she said. The twice-orphan regarded her suspiciously, but said nothing. Taja didn't blame her. Beautiful girls, such as Taja was, were always regarded with abject chariness around the time of the Selection, as the world and its mother tried to discern exactly which devil they had dealt with to avoid being chosen.

Well, Taja stood beside hers.

The devil spoke now. "How long do we have?" As though he didn't already know - as though he didn't feel the tick-tick-tick of his pocket watch in his ribs and his throat, the same way Taja always did.

He didn't have to ask Mara if she had completed her task accordingly. That was a given.

With a slightly sly softening of her scowl, the smaller girl reached into her jacket and pulled out a black brass key, hanging on a chain almost thicker than her forearm. "Second watch starts in ten minutes," she said. "Where's Cappie?"

"I don't need Cappie," Yegor said, and Taja had to suppress a smile.

Mara looked doubtful - the girl was quick and quiet, but the girl could only be so quick and so quiet before she got caught, and there was always a first time - but Yegor's grey, grey eyes could be persuasive and tonight he was in fine form, so towards the gate Mara turned and pushed it open to allow Taja and Yegor enter.

Yegor went first, and did not bother to wait, but Taja hesitated at the threshold of the cemetery, the border between the quick and the dead, to turn to Mara. The girl was looking, not at Taja, but beyond, at Yegor's lean shape as he moved purposefully between dappled moonlight and shade. What he was looking for, Taja wasn't certain - it was difficult, sometimes, to try and understand the way Yegor's mind worked, the rapidity at which he planned and unravelled and planned anew, the games of chess he seemed to be constantly winning and losing against his own self. She couldn't imagine it was any easier for the young thief to try and discern what was what. She didn't know Yegor like Taja did.

The rebel spoke softly now: "You'd better get home, Masha. It's a full moon, after all."

Mara regarded Taja with that same gaze. Her eyes were lilies-of-the-Nile; they burned, despite the gloom creeping close with the assurance of the night. She did not say what both girls were thinking - that she had no home to get to, not anymore - but instead she nodded, rather reluctantly. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew a small black stone, about the size of an eye, and handed it to Taja. Her hands were warm. She said, "Right again, Sweeney. I hear these days wolves tend to prowl at night."

"I think they always did," Taja said. She didn't bother to say goodbye to the girl - Yegor was moving away, lost somewhere in that mercury-and-silver mind of his and she didn't want to lose him. She turned, and did not run, but moved quickly from the gates and was distantly aware that Mara had pulled the chains tightly around them and was busily locking them into the graveyard.

If Yegor hadn't mentioned that this was a cemetery for royal bones, it would have, Taja thought, been easy enough to guess: in an era when the typical fate for a corpse was to join its brethren in a wide, deep pit that remained uncovered until the carcasses reached the surface once more, or to burn on a pyre with the rest of the detritus of the world, to inter a body in wood and stone was a luxury indeed. Each grave was set down into the ground, iron bars like those of a cell barring them from the sky; the palace were superstitious, if anyone was, and went to lengths to keep the vultures and the crows from settling upon the graves. The cemetery was a series of cages, as though the dead might wake and attempt to flee.

Yegor was standing between two of the tombs, looking at the stone plaques in front of each. There was no name, only a number written there: on the left, twenty-three; on the right, twenty four. He said nothing as Taja joined him, standing at his shoulder and studying the pale angles of his face as he studied the dark shape of the graves. He looked tired, more tired than usual - his skin was drawn tight over the surface of his bones, like they had grown sharp without him noticing. The collar of his coat was speckled with dust.

The stone Mara had handed her was smooth and dark - purple, she noted now, rather than the black she had initially assumed. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew it and handed it to Yegor. His hands, as always, were gloved.

One hundred years, and the same king kept the throne - these graves were not for his benefit.

Yegor said, quite certainly, "Twenty-three," and Taja nodded.

There was a little iron catch on the iron gate barring the coffin from the air, and she knelt now to undo it, her fingers sure and steady despite the chill in the air and the shriek of a vixen somewhere in the forest beyond the city's edges. If she looked left, above the walls of the cemetery, she could see the auburn glow of Honduragua, alight as though the city was burning, burning, burning; if she looked right, she could see the edge of Illea, the edge of the world, and the darkness, starless and moonless, beyond.

The gate swung upwards, so Taja pushed it as high as she could without rising, and Yegor caught it for her and laid it softly on the grass. His grey eyes were determined - they had a spark to them that told Taja this strange, esoteric task of theirs was an important one indeed, no matter how stoic and languid he appeared. She had seen that look before.

The first time she had met him, he had worn that look in his eyes. He had looked at her, and he had held out his hand, and he had invited her to make a choice she had known she would regret.

Well, she hadn't regretted it yet.

Yegor held out his hand to Taja now again. She took it, very gingerly, to steady herself as she jumped into the grave.

There was a small pile of stones on the wooden surface of the grave. Three, just like the one Mara had handed to her, smooth and faultless, piled in a very neat triangle over the royal seal on the coffin. Was it so easy to stifle the dead? For her part, Taja brushed the stones away without a second thought and hoisted the coffin up. It was light, lighter than she could have anticipated and for a moment Taja was worried that it would continue nothing but bones, but Yegor seemed confident so she levered it up and pushed it high enough that he could catch it and keep it steady while she climbed out.

Then, together, they pulled the coffin out of the ground and set it by the edge of the grave. Yegor, Taja noticed now, had brought a crowbar - she shouldn't have expected anything else. He offered it to her, the corner of his mouth lifting in a charming smile. "My lady," he said softly and Taja could only roll her eyes and try not to laugh out loud as she took it from him.

The nails were sharp, the wood was strong, but Yegor's smile was sharper and Taja was stronger and soon the lid was pried off and thrown to the side and the two revolutionaries were staring into the coffin at the face of the girl who lay within: pale and perfect and very, very dead.

"Who is she?" Taja asked softly.

Yegor raised his eyes. He watched her from under his lashes - and then, he said, "does it matter?"

Taja felt her heart sink a little. Trusted more than the rest, perhaps, but that didn't mean he trusted her much at all. She shook her head. "I guess not," she said.

Yegor knelt by the corpse and Taja addressed her gaze to the tiny pinpricks of aureate light which had begun to speckle the night sky. "I guess not," she said again.

Silence for a moment. Silences, with Yegor, could last a long time indeed, she knew from experience. But he broke this one himself, and rather quickly - his voice remained as level and cool as ever. He said, "Her name was Adelaide."

Taja looked at him quietly.

Yegor said, "Help me carry it out of here, will you?"

* * *

The lights did not come back on. Oliver waited until the daylight had begun to illuminate the edges of the palace, set the gold and marble alight in a kind of ersatz flame, and he saw that the windows were dark and that the balcony was empty. The Selection had retreated once more out of the reach of the stars and the sky.

Had the girl jumped?

He didn't think she had.

He slid his spyglass shut and slipped from his vantage point without being seen or remembered, offering a few pretty words to those that would have barred his path and disappearing back into the city's mazescape, utterly anonymous in the chaos of people and action and movement that was Angeles at this early hour.

When he had first joined the rebellion, he had often wondered at those around him, those flashes of face or uniform he would catch in the corner of his eye as he walked down the street. How many of them were collaborators to the resistance, hidden as he was within plain sight, and how many would be willing to see him hung from the palace walls, head on a spike, and family slaughtered?

He didn't need to worry about that last one anymore, of course. He didn't think he really cared about the other two either.

There was a message waiting for him in the bare room he had rented from a woman with more scars than teeth. It was still an unfamiliar place to him, despite the long months he had spent in this city, waiting, biding his time, watching as the liar prince Calau put together his little collection of pretty poison girls, his Selected. Written in an untidy hand on a scrap of lined grey paper, it was sitting on the kitchen table that made up one of three pieces of furniture decorating the space - a chair and bed completed the ensemble. There was little trace as to how it had arrived - the windows were shut, the door locked, nothing disturbed. The **Y** at the bottom of the note rather looked as though it had been burned there.

Oliver picked it up, and glanced at it only briefly. There wasn't much to read - just enough to quicken his pulse and ready him for vengeance.

 ** _Pieces in place. Take your position. We begin in three days._**

 **\- Y**

* * *

 **Thank you all so much for your wondrously kind reviews; I am grateful indeed, you guys are absolutely the best - you wouldn't believe how motivating they are! I loved seeing your thoughts and theories - some of you seem to be psychic, I swear.**

 **There are still characters to be introduced, so progress may be slow for the next chapter or so, and then we can really get into the swing of things. As always, I welcome whatever criticism you may have, as I am always looking to improve. Thanks for reading!**


	5. Chapter 5

_These are outsiders, always. These stars—_

 _these iron inklings of a January,_

 _whose light happened_

 _thousands of years before_

 _our pain did; they are, they have always been_

 _outside history._

 _They keep their distance. Under them remains_

 _a place where you found_

 _you were human, and_

 _a landscape in which you know you are mortal:_

 _those rivers, those roads clotted as_

 _firmaments with the dead._

 _How slowly they die_

 _as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear._

 _And we are too late. We are always too late._

 **Eavan Boland**

* * *

Midnight came more quickly than anyone could have dreamed, with the striking of the clocks above Honduragua rumbling thunder-like through the dark clouds that had come to hang low above the spires and wooden roofs of the city. Mindful of Yegor's strict instructions, Minette had locked herself into one of the spare bedrooms with ten minutes to spare - which gave her plenty of time to examine the wounded mahogany of the empty shelves and the threadbare blankets strewn about before she felt the threads of her borrowed skin began to dissolve and fall apart.

Beneath the mask lay another, of iron, of gold, of steel, one Minette could not alter but one which fragmented and broke apart come midnight nevertheless and left her as herself. Recognisably and rarely so, pale and pretty, blonde and blemishless, a girl of stars and dreams, a girl who could not exist but in the midnight hour, and she savoured the reflection in the mirror for as long as it lasted - which was not long at all.

A curse was a curse was a curse. The false face grew again like rust, slowly and gradually - the burns appeared first, blooming into red blemishes across her nose and cheekbones as though like one of the Fabulists she had taken a branding iron to her own face. Then the scarification, long thick ridges of callused tissue stark white and anaemic. The hair tangled, matted, grew strings of clumped dirt even as she watched. It was very nearly beautiful, she thought, _almost_. But it was not beautiful - and nor, now, was she.

There were only two, perhaps three, rooms in this little safe house, and with so many new faces and voices about and the promise of more to come she felt almost uncertain setting her music box beside the bed, but she did. She wound it and opened it, and listened to her mother's voice, soft and wordless, until her iron mask was firmly back in place and the peal of midnight had dissipated into the stars above Honduragua. Minette looked herself in the mirror, and remembered the sheer disgust on Levi's face upon glimpsing beneath her mask - and she was growing brave, but not brave enough. Not enough to face everyone else in this little rebellious enclave looking at her like that. Levi would have to get used to it; eventually, so would the rest.

Minette could only steal the faces of those she had seen. Usually that meant people she had met, people she had spoken to, people she had seen move and smile and speak. Yesterday's mask had been the very first time she had attempted a replication from photograph alone, and she thought the seams had been very obvious. So she chose another instead - dark skin, wild corkscrew hair, big soft eyes like a doe. A pretty, unassuming face. Innocent.

Once her mask was in place, she opened the door again. The place was in hush, as though it had been waiting for her to exit her room - and then the silence was broken by Andromeda's voice, low and guttural, agonised.

"It's bad," Nithya was saying. The street medic had been in the back room with the injured woman when midnight had struck but now she was hovering at the threshold of the kitchen, uncertain. "Worse than I thought..." Her heart-shaped face was all creased with the etchings of anxiety. "Infection," she was saying. "And a lot of blood."

Minette moved closer, padding quietly down the hallway. Taja was standing in the centre of the kitchen like Nithya's words were an assault, her arms folded, and Levi was silently shuffling a deck of cards, sitting at the narrow wooden table, wounded by tiny knicks and burns like someone had attacked it, that dominated the dining area. No Cappie. No Yegor. Maybe, soon, no Andromeda.

Nithya sounded resigned, and rather as though she resented speaking to Taja at all. "I've done all I can."

Taja was silent, one long finger gently testing the edge of a safety pin she had removed from the inside of her jacket. Then, very abruptly - too abruptly for Minette to perceive the motion until it was complete - she stabbed the pin into the flesh at the inside of her wrist, strong enough to drive two inches of iron into her skin and produce a weak, watery tear from the corner of one brown eye.

Minette almost yelped in abject sympathy. Nithya flinched, although her face suggested this was hardly a new occurence. Blood welled up at the crease of Taja's wrist, hot and dark.

"Back in a second," Taja said, and went into the back room.

Nithya exhaled through her teeth, an irritated, fearful gesture, and looked at Minette with the same dislike. So many of the rebel's so-called allies detested the very existence of a resistance - they hated the fact it was necessary at all, they hated what the bloody men and women did in the name of freedom, and they hated that the war never seemed to be won. Minette thought Nithya was probably one such ally. She might set their bones and stitch their wounds and cure their ailments, and she might support the rebellion, but she didn't like the rebels, didn't like what they had become. Not one bit.

"Tell Yegor," Nithya said, her voice low. "I did my best."

Minette glanced at Levi, but Nithya's eyes were fixed on her. The masked girl nodded, uncertainly. "I'll tell him."

Nithya moved quickly, grabbing her doctor's bag, a battered satchel, from the counter and disappearing out the door as though she feared the king himself might be waiting outside to catch her. She left a faint scent of perfume hanging in the air behind her - blue lobelia and hyssop, Minette thought, piercingly sweet, as sweet as sugar tasted from the edge of a knife.

Andromeda made a strangled sound in the back room and Minette started as Cappie faded into being beside her, carrying a bottle of something dark purple and pungent in one hand, and carrying a little girl in her other. Minette found herself staring at the child - so sudden and abrupt was her presence. She was half-asleep, her hair tied back in a tangled braid that looked as though she had worn it for perhaps a week or more, her clothes a little ragged like she had come fresh from the streets. She observed Minette sleepily for a moment, and then set her head back rather resolutely on Cappie's shoulder, looking resentful.

"Taja's helping," the ghost girl said. It wasn't a question. "Ooh, Yegor won't be happy." She threw the bottle to Levi, who caught it in one hand without looking up from his cards. "You done in the room, Minette? I'm a little sleepy. Might as well get some rest before Yegor gets us all killed, huh?" Cappie looked up at the ceiling as though expecting to see stars there, and nodded firmly, before heading into the bedroom Minette had just vacated, and shutting the door firmly behind her. The child had not spoken.

Minette wondered if Cappie sometimes faded in her sleep as well - if she found herself being eroded away at midnight, as Minette did, and if she sometimes lost her edges, the shape of herself. Was it hard, once you had lost yourself, to find the person you had been before?

She thought it must be.

Taja's face was dirty with tear streaks when she reappeared in the kitchen, but she didn't seem inclined to grieve, to act sorrowful - she took two small shot glasses out of the cupboard and sat opposite Levi with her boots on the chair opposite, dropping the glasses on the table and shooting Minette a sharp look. "Want some?" She seemed at once irritated and tired, aloof and friendly. It was an odd combination.

Levi uncorked the bottle and started to pour. The drink was even darker out of the bottle - closer to black than purple, like snake's venom. Minette shook her head. Levi looked at her, then, for the first time, as though her movement had caught his eye, as though they were meeting for the first time. He must have got used to her false face; the corners of his lips twitched, an almost smile, a far cry from the disregard he had shown her that evening. Minette didn't feel quite so nervous then about moving closer to take a seat as the kitchen clock ticked the minutes away until dawn.

Taja leaned forward as Levi started silently to deal once more, his hands quick and sure as he split the deck between himself and her, two wolves playing, one Yegor's tame hound, the other big and bad and offering Minette a slight smile when he found her watching him. She didn't understand this game - she wondered if rebels always played by their own rules. There was near total silence - wolves, she supposed, didn't need to speak. Occasionally, one or the other would say a single word - _horseman_ or _cannon,_ something vaguely militariastic and the other would shake their head and sigh as they handed the other a card. They drank between deals. Levi refilled their glasses every time they emptied. He finished his glass before Taja, always. Within two or three games, the bottle was drained, but neither looked as though they were anything less than stone-cold sober.

Minette found herself moving closer, trying to somehow divine the code by which this game was played, inclined forward in her seat. Without looking at her, Levi said, his voice wry, " _Keep a gamester from the dice, and a good student from his book, and it is wonderful._ "

"Lecturing someone else about gambling," Taja said, rubbing a card with her thumb as she considered the spread across the table. "Know what that makes you, Fallon? A hypocrite. _Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all._ "

" _Few_ ," Levi replied. " _Love to hear the sins they love to act._ Anyone have dice? We could play a game of liar's."

Taja flicked her eyes up at him. "You're only trying to change the game because I have the ace, Fallon."

"Only a fool plays a game he knows he'll lose," Levi replied. "And speaking of fools..."

"No."

"I know the smell of a grave, Sweeney."

Minette almost held her breath.

Taja turned her attention back to her cards. "Why should I know? He doesn't tell me anything. He doesn't need to."

"Need to know basis?" Minette glanced at Levi who shrugged.

"I doubt we could understand Yegor's mind even if he told us what he was thinking. Alright, Sweeney. Five red, two black, you have the ace."

He dealt again, and someone knocked at the door. In the very same moment, Taja and Levi went still. Listening. Watching. Waiting.

Two knocks. Three, four, five. A pattern. Like a heart-beat.

Taja gave Minette a sharp nod, and the masked girl rose from the table to open the door. The girl waiting behind it looked as though she was dying, almost-dead, already dead and still standing only through sheer tenacity and strength of will. She raised her head to stare, wild-eyed, into Minette's false eyes.

Minette found herself staring into a broken mirror. The same face she had worn the day before, a mask with a crack running the length of it, through an eye blackened with bruises and a swollen lower lip. Skin had been scraped from the high, hollow cheekbone, leaving flesh red and raw.

Taja was at Minette's shoulder in a second, and the girl whose face Minette had worn spoke to her as she said, her tongue bloody, "They know. The king knows."

* * *

Honduragua woke late and languid, so wild were its nights, that the streets were empty despite the warmth of the early dawn; Oliver found he rather enjoyed the silence. It was a far cry from Angeles, and all of its chaos and constant, cruel motion. Here, one could hear their own breath, see it hanging in front of them, be assured that it was their footsteps only that they heard and their shadows only that they saw. All the magic dissipated come four or five in the morning; it belonged to the midnight, to the wild scatter of stars like thrown dice, to the darkness and the flickering light of the revels.

It was still dark. He had arrived in the province in the deepest, darkest part of the night and little light had spilled across the sky to change that in the hour or so it had taken him to move from the borders towards the heart of the city, where the rest of his team waited. He moved quickly, travelled light - he could always find new weapons in Honduragua if it came to that. And Yegor's note seemed to promise that it would.

 _Three days._

Oliver had been waiting long enough, and three days ought to be nothing, a fraction of a fraction of the time he had patiently awaited his vengeance, but the closer they drew towards the hour the more impatient he found his thoughts becoming, the more frantic for action his nerves grew. He was ready. He was ready. He was ready, so why wait three days?

Move now. Strike now. Burn now.

Adelaide deserved that much, didn't she?

He would have been an idiot to think that Yegor hadn't chosen his position without knowing what that role would mean. Watching the Selection - watching every single one of those girls walk into that palace - and knowing that each was Adelaide and that Adelaide had been each, scared and alone and walking to her death. Had Yegor believed he needed that motivation to sharpen his need for vengeance, to whet his anger and keep him waiting? Yegor had been wrong. As though Oliver would ever forget what the king and his hunger had done to his older sister. As though his hatred would ever dissipate from the fire in his veins.

The safe house glowed forth from the dark, the copper verdigris glowing like a ghastly thing in the gloom, something diseased or rotten, wounded doors on shattered balconies resembling broken teeth. Broken glass crunched underfoot; some merchants had abandoned stalls on the sides of the street, but their wares had turned to ash after midnight. Oliver ran his fingers through the thick dark sinders and pushed open the door to the safe house.

A narrow flight of stairs led up to the apartment, which glowed with wan light made staccato by passing shadows. In the flickering light, Oliver realised that there was a little girl sitting on the third step from the landing, knees drawn to her chin, staring down the steps, lips moving slightly as though singing to herself.

He had got the address wrong. He must have. Or did this safe house belong to some sympathetic family, some benefactor and his wife and children, with rebels hiding in false walls and under the beds like childhood monsters when the guards came knocking?

"Hello," Oliver said to the girl. "What are you doing out here?"

She observed him solemnly, as though deciding whether or not he was worth speaking to, whether he counted as _stranger_. He supposed a girl like this accustomed to strange men with blood on their hands often dropping by during the night. He added, "Is Yegor up there?" and gestured up the stairs, which seemed to make up her mind.

"He told me to wait out here."

"He did?"

She nodded, big eyes serious, her lips uncertain as to whether she would smile or cry. "Because of the crooked girl. He said he didn't want her to put the evil eye on me. So I'm waiting out here until she goes."

"The crooked girl?"

"With the scar."

That wasn't a good sign. That could not, conceivably, be a good sign. Because as little as Oliver knew of Yegor's plans for the days and nights ahead, and that was very little indeed, he knew that they would not involve the crooked man's daughter, the liar, the arsonist. Kasha brought destruction in her wake, and sometimes that was useful, but often it was not, and her very face was a reminder of what she was capable of and where her priorities lay. Oliver had met her once. He had not spoken to her. She hadn't so much as looked at him. But he had known what she was.

One monster recognizes another.

* * *

A corpse is a corpse is a corpse. That's what Yegor had always known - it was part of being a Corbeau. One set of bones was rather like the next, once the soul had been well and thoroughly shaken from them. One skin was like another. Faces tended to look the same without life in them.

But something nevertheless fascinated him about Adelaide Tyrrell. Not the corpse, not the girl, but the way in which the girl had become the corpse. The Selection killed, true, but how? No Selected girl ever returned from the palace, but why? The queen was the only one ever seen again, and Yegor found himself staring at photos of Adelaide's open, staring eyes and asking himself what, exactly, had killed her.

That was all he had - photos. Oliver would be arriving soon. Yegor was quick and Yegor was clever, but Yegor was neither quick nor clever enough to think of an excuse for having his sister's carcass in the safe house should Oliver stumble across it. It would hear his blood, Yegor knew. People would die, Yegor knew. Well, people would die anyway - Yegor just didn't plan on being one of them. So Taja had stowed the cadaver and Yegor had locked himself in his room and now he asked himself why, why, why.

The night had grown weary of being night while he asked himself this question. Taja had come to the door perhaps two hours ago - sweet, mercurial, dangerous Taja - to call through the door and offer tea, something to eat, fresh air, and Yegor had been so lost in his thoughts he had not realised he had not answered her until she had gone away again. Well, Taja was accustomed to being treated like that. She was one of the revolutionary girls, but a pale facsimile of the same - her eyes were not as bright, her heart was not as passionate. Not like Andromeda, who burned with the sheer righteousness of revolution. Not like Cappie, who wore her sureness on her sleeve and he certainty on her collar.

No, Taja fought because Yegor told her to fight.

Earlier, when they had carried the bleeding, dying Andromeda in from the cold air, Taja had gone to heal her and Yegor had told her not to. To see if she would listen, perhaps. She had listened. She had left Andromeda to her screams, and she had left with Yegor for a graveyard, and if she had thought Yegor oblivious to the way she looked at him...

Well, then Taja was more a fool than Yegor had ever been.

But useful.

He left his pen to the desk and stood, staring at the photos for a moment - at the dead girl and her eyes - before he carefully slid them into the hidden pocket sewn into the interior of his coat and moved across the room to unlock the door. Oliver would be here by now. Andromeda would be up by now. Kasha would be talking by now.

"Sinodie was there." The smoky, venom-laced voice of the crooked man's daughter was soft, conjuring thought of arsenic, of hemlock; as Yegor moved into the kitchen, he caught sight of the dark-haired girl sitting on the counter beside the stove and looking malevolent, her bruised knees bare and a silent Levi bandaging her left hand. Her dark hair hung in damp tendrils about her angular face, and she looked at Yegor as he entered, her eyes hard.

Cruelty and selfishness in those eyes, although she hid it well enough. Yegor didn't think she looked at anyone the way Taja looked at him.

"I thought they sent her north," Andromeda snapped with an accusing tone.

"They must have sent her back," Taja shot back, just as quickly. Taja always did choose sides quickly. She tended to defend what was hers. Yegor liked that.

Yegor caught Kasha's eye. Her smile broadened, sharp teeth apparent, and she spoke to him when she spoke: "and the prince."

Levi's hands stilled on Kasha's, but he said nothing - it was Cappie, looking up from the pot of tea she was brewing by the window, who said mildly, "I didn't think he went with the raids..."

Little green Minette said, wearing a more original face this time, that blurted: "the prince?"

"The prince gets into your head," Oliver said. "Devours your thoughts, spews nightmare into the spaces left behind..."

"But the queen," Kasha said. "The queen will rip your heart out."

There was something devastatingly final about the way she said that.

"We won't have to worry about you, so, Karga," Yegor said, and if that name drew her ire she did well to hide it. "Did he get into your head, then?"

For a moment he thought she would make her ersatz-father proud and lie as she usually did, but with a tightening of the tendons by her jaw and a curl of her fingers, she shrugged. "He did," she said. "There wasn't much to get into."

No. Yegor Corbeau had been certain of that in particular. No one knew more than they ought, more than they needed to know. And Kasha, with her head full of lies, needed to know little indeed.

"Better than getting into your heart," Taja said from the doorway.

She had a tremendously dour tone to her voice that made Yegor wonder if one of her bad days was drawing down over her, a black veil that would construct and choke and obliterate. If so, he seemed to have the only one in the room to notice.

With a sly flicker of his eyes, Oliver Tyrrell spoke - to Taja, to Yegor, to whoever was listening. "This is it, then?"

Yegor couldn't blame him for the slightly sardonic tone in his voice - it was a motley crew indeed assembled, hardly inspiring confidence in the feat that faced them. Taja had her head cocked at an angle, leaning in the doorframe; Andromeda and Minette were sitting in wooden chairs at the wooden table, the former's arms folded and the latter's hands knotted on her lap; Oliver was standing by the window, as though ready for a quick escape. Cappie moved quietly between sink and table with a pot of tea and Levi went to pour himself a cup, Kasha's blood forming dark red crescents beneath his nails. With a slight self-deprecating shrug, Yegor joined him.

"Yes," he said with a smile, and leaned against the table with his arms folded. "This is it."

Minette was still looking at Kasha, but Oliver was looking at Andromeda. "And she is..."

"The muscle," Andromeda said with a slight smirk.

"So you're a spare," Kasha said, in a darkly delighted tone, and Andromeda's expression darkened significantly.

"Watch your tongue, crooked girl," the red-haired woman said dangerously. "Or lose it."

Levi didn't look up from his tea. His tone was mild. "Don't talk to Kasha like that."

Andromeda's tongue could be as sharp as her spear, which was why Yegor interrupted her before she could snap out a reply and spoke very quickly indeed.

"We have three days," he said, very calmly, and took a lazy sip of his tea while all eyes turned to him. Call him what you would - a revolutionary, a soldier, a killer - but he played well to an audience. "Three days before we have very little time at all."

Cappie said, cautiously, "We have to wait three days?"

Astute girl, that one. She hid herself from the world and watched it all go by, untouchable. Yegor nodded. "We have to wait," he agreed. "But I have plenty to keep you busy. Valour..."

"My mission was a success," Andromeda said quickly, sparks of her bruised pride from Kasha's barbs making her voice even harsher than usual.

"I don't question that," Yegor said, and was rewarded with a slight smirk. "I've arranged a meeting with Apemios Collins at his estate - Cappie's going to get Minette in and out without being seen. While they do, I want you and Taja to head over to Rook's Avenue, find a rooftop somewhere for us to plant Levi come Saturday."

"They had Sidonie yesterday," Taja said, irritated. "They'll have her on Saturday."

"We can handle Gaëlle Sidonie and her pretty moving pictures," Andromeda said, defiantly.

"If we do this right," Oliver noted. "We won't have to."

Yegor nodded. He reached into his jacket and pulled the sheet of paper from the pocket he had sewn there - for a gun, for a key, for secrets. He held it out between two fingers to Levi. "James Lawson has moved back to Honduragua," he said. "Doing parlor tricks in the square and flirting with local girls. Maybe you and the arsonist could go and catch up."

"James Lawson," Levi said. He took the page, folded it without reading it, and stuck it into his back pocket. "He was sweet on you once upon a time, wasn't he, Kash?" He sounded as amused as Yegor had ever heard him - if Levi was all things gasoline, Kasha was a lit match. The wolf of Bonita was never quite as alive as when he was with the crooked man's daughter. Yegor hadn't yet decided if that was a good or bad thing.

Kasha was picking at loose threads in the knee of her jeans, her smile small. She still had blood staining the crease of her knuckles. "Was he? I don't recall."

"Kasha," Yegor said. "Has a habit of leaving broken men and boys in her wake. They don't realise she's utterly heartless until it's far too late, you see."

"I'll keep that in mind," Oliver said with a charming cockiness to his tone, and Kasha's glance at him was slow and languid and more than a little bit derisive. As though as a challeng, Oliver held that gaze and Yegor could almost see the thought flirting across his mind to use his honeyed words, to charm this heartless girl and prove her nothing more than as human as the rest of them, but the moment passed and Kasha returned to her bandages and Oliver looked at Yegor and said, "Three days."

"Three days," Yegor agreed. "Three days and we shall spill first blood - and then, Tyrrell, you may drink your fill."


	6. Chapter 6

_With the malevolent wings, the meridians of death,  
I have seen you - at the gallows,  
I have seen you: it was you,  
With your exact science set on extermination,  
Without love. You have killed again,  
As always, as your fathers killed,  
as the animals killed that saw you for the first time.  
And this blood smells as on the day  
When one brother told the other brother:  
"Let us go into the fields."  
_

 _Forgot, O sons, forget your fathers:  
Their tombs sink down in ashes,  
Black birds, the wind, cover their heart._

 **Salvatore Quasimodo**

* * *

They piled the dead beside the quays of Dominica, dozens atop dozens, and burned them where they lay. Rivulets of gasoline and petrol, spilled lazily across their flesh, ran across their skin and across the cobbled streets, and puddled at his shoes. If he looked down, he could see himself in the oil-slick surface of it: young, and pale, and frightened.

His hair touched his shoulders, wild. His hair hadn't been that long since Jaana had left.

In his dreams, the girl who moved between the corpses had Kasha's face, her dark skin, her bloody clothes and her bruises on her hands. When she raised her head to meet his gaze, he could see that her scar was gone - as were her eyes. Dark, hollow pits stared back, even without eyes amused, and it was the queen who began to laugh as Yegor watched the bodies of his team burn.

There was a raven at his window when he woke, gold butterflies raining through the sky behind it. Yegor watched the corpid, as though daring it to speak, to croak, to lie with a slit tongue dripping arsenic.

"Nevermore," Yegor said softly, and the raven took wing as though startled into a starless sky.

* * *

 _"Come with me," the devil said and she didn't have to think twice._

 _She was tired of bleeding. She was tired of bruising. She was tired of breaking. She had no tears left - every day she thought the same and every day she proved herself wrong. The world closed in on her, a world of corners and tight spaces. If this was hell, there would be no escape but the one the devil offered her._

 _And what a handsome devil he was._

 _This, then, was love._

* * *

Minette extended a finger hesitantly to the perfectly symmetrical, perfectly otherworldly golden butterfly that had alighted on the doorknob, aureate wings quivering in the slightest movement of her breath. It felt like silk on her finger, somehow weightless, as though it had been wrought from the very sunlight that streamed through the open balcony doors. She shut her mouth tightly, and tried to stop her heart with a mere thought, for fear of disturbing the creature, so small and wonderful it was, and for the briefest moment she held magic on the very tip of her nail - a tiny, flawless piece of magic.

Kasha dropped something heavy on the table on her way out to the balcony and sent the butterfly spiralling into the air once more. Minette sighed a tired sigh.

"You're showing off," Kasha told Levi, her words careless. He was out on the balcony in early morning cold with the little girl, the one they called Charity, entertaining her with golden butterflies dripping from his teacup and charming little silvery sparrows from out behind her hair. The little girl was trapping them in her small hands, spinning in a cloud of jewel-like insects, tempting tiny birds across the balcony with bits of rotten bread. The arsonist nudged Levi's leg from the balcony so she could sit on it, her back curved, long legs hanging lazily. "Quit showing off."

The soldier didn't even look up from his book, didn't move his hand from the spoon with which he stirred his coffee, but as Minette watched a shroud of the glossy moths and butterflies that cluttered the balcony, hemmed in by invisible glass walls woven of wordless magic, began to settle on Kasha's her shoulders, her head, so that they were woven amongst the inky strands of her hair, a stirring ornament gleaming impossibly. When she moved her head, they caught the light, and the arsonist appeared to burn with all the light of the heavens.

You almost didn't notice the scar.

"And you," Levi said, as Kasha flicked away one of the insects with a blunt nail and Minette winced in sympathy, "are being impatient."

"That can hardly be a surprise to you, _volkaya_."

"You always surprise me, darling," Levi said, rather theatrically, rather loftily, and then looked a little - well, not quite embarrassed, but _something -_ when he caught Minette watching them, as though he was unaccustomed to being kind and having his kindness witnessed. "I never knew you were so fond of Lawson, Kash. He's not your type."

"My type? You," Kasha said. "Have _clearly_ never seen that boy's..."

" _Enough_." Levi's smile was brighter than a hundred, a thousand, of his golden falsities, and he directed it at the floor, shaking his head ruefully. Minette had not believed a face as sharp and as cruel and as handsome as his capable of such warmth. She didn't like it. "I don't think I want to hear this."

Kasha's voice was deceivingly innocent, full of impossible honeyed promises. "Oh? _My_ _sad behavior feeds your vulture folly. Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger?_ _But oh,_ " And she put a scarred hand to her bruised forehead. _"What damnèd minutes tells he o'er, w_ _ho dotes..."_

 _"Yet doubts, suspects,_ " Levi said, with a tone that suggested victory. Minette laughed and Levi shook his head and knocked on Kasha's bruised, black knee with the book in his hand as he turned to look at her. "New face?" he said to the masked girl.

"Old face," she replied, taken aback at how simply he spoke to her. The iron mask - the burned one, the scarred one, the ugly one, the one she could not remove or alter no matter how much she wished to do so - was firmly in place once more. Yegor had advised her to save her strength, what little magic she possessed, if this could be called magic. And Yegor, Andromeda had muttered under her breath on the way out the door, was never wrong.

"It's nice," Levi said.

Minette smiled.

Kasha laughed. "Lies don't suit you, Fallon." She punctuated her words by flicking away another golden moth from where it clung to her hair.

Minette's smile faded.

Now she could see the sunlight playing on the surface of his tea, shimmering gold and silver in the pale morning, and as she watched another butterfly peeled itself from the puddle of shine and glimmer and fluttered skyward. Levi watched it go, looking thoughtful.

"No," he said. "I don't think they do."

Cappie faded into being at Minette's shoulder, and the masked girl jumped. She didn't think she would ever, ever get used to the way that ghost had of forcing the world to hide her at will. Now she held armfuls of clothes and fabrics, alternately dark and pale. Poor colours, Minette thought - there was no other way of describing them. They simply lacked richness. She was familiar with clothes like these.

"You know," Cappie said lazily, apparently oblivious to the hypocrisy in her words. "That's kind of a waste, isn't it?"

"A waste?" Minette repeated, uncertain.

"The parlour tricks," Cappie said, and Levi smiled and spilled his tea away over the balcony, all the light draining with it.

"I have enough pain to fuel my use," he said calmly, and Kasha caught Minette staring and wondering and she answered an unspoken question.

"Magic is all about sacrifice," Kasha said. "Even I know that much." Levi laughed. "Sometimes that builds slowly - use and use and use your magic knowing that it's eroding something, stealing something, culminating in something awful. And sometimes that's sudden and abrupt and bloody."

"You," the masked girl said suspiciously. "Sound like you know a lot about this."

She wondered what magic Kasha had. Whether they called her the arsonist for that reason - whether she scorched with a touch and burned with her gaze. But Kasha didn't seem the type to indulge in magic.

Kasha shrugged slowly, a thoughtful gesture like she was rolling the knots out of her shoulders. "The crooked man made deals," she said. "Magic is _all_ about deals."

Cappie laughed. "That's a nice way to say it, isn't it?" The ghost looked at Minette, her laugh dying on her face. "Her mother gave her away," she said. "That's what Kasha can't be bothered to tell you. That's why she doesn't use her real name - because her mother traded her in to a monster for a handful of starlight and a string of wishes on a chain."

"I can't fault her," Kasha said. "I couldn't compete with a deal that, could I?"

Levi plucked a golden butterfly from her hair. "No," he agreed sympathetically. "I'd trade you for far less."

When Kasha stuck her tongue out at Levi, Minette was half-surprised to see that it was not forked.

Click click click went Yegor's cane on the floorboards. Funny the effect that could have on a group of arsonists and murderers and ghosts and girls - all turned to seek its source, and they were not disappointed. Yegor moved slowly into the kitchen, a delay borne not of infirmity but of some kind of solemnity, as though his thoughts were heavy enough to drag behind him as lead anchors.

"You can't go out like that," Yegor said to Levi and Kasha, who looked unsurprised at this pronouncement. Minette supposed it made sense: all of Kasha's clothes were torn and dirty and burnt; Levi had given her his soldier's jacket, but it was a bloody, battle-stained one, frayed at the cuffs, the mark of some Zuni garrison on the lapel, buttons missing, like he was a corpse from some long-ago forgotten war risen for some nefarious purpose. No good for blending in. "Mara and Nithya sourced some Honduraguan clothes for you all. If the king knows we're here, then we would do well _not_ to be here as soon as possible. Until then..." He gestured to Cappie with his cane. "Everyone, try to be a little bit more like Achterkamp. We're ghosts now."

Cappie smiled.

"Minette," Yegor said, as the others went out onto the balcony. "Can I speak to you for a moment?"

Minette paused, and could find no reason to say no, and so turned away from Levi and the others as Yegor moved across the kitchen, that same slow, thoughtful movement. She wondered where he had sent Andromeda and Taja - to what fate they had disappeared into the dawn fog, Andromeda wearing knives under her jacket and Taja looking dark and dangerous and wolfish, her eyes like picks. Oliver had departed a few minutes after them, with an expression that suggested blood would follow.

Minette hoped that whatever tasks Yegor assigned them, they would come back with their blood on the right side of their skin.

"I just wanted to say good luck," Yegor said. He had pushed his shirt-sleeves up to his elbows, which looked far more formal than it should have, and Minette abruptly noticed that he was more slender than she had assumed - was lean the right word? He looked like a shadow with a heartbeat, just life-like enough that few questions were asked. He looked _sick_. With stress? She didn't think Corbeau would recognise the word.

"Do you think I'll need it?"

He folded his arms and turned his head away, a slight smile dancing on the edge of his mouth. "I hope you won't. But I'm a realist." He glanced askew at her. "Are you scared?"

In that moment, Minette was not a liar. "Yes," she said softly.

"I won't let anything happen to you. If anything goes wrong..."

Minette bit her lip and stared at the window. "Please don't say that."

"Levi will be there," Yegor said. "Trust him, even if you don't trust me."

Minette looked at him, for a long, long moment, and could only shake her head, slowly, and swallow back the fear she had almost managed to quell. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me that you need me to do this. That this is the only way. That it'll make a difference."

Yegor never hesitated when he lied. "Yes," he said. "It will be the difference between victory and failure, Minette."

She shut her eyes, and drew in a deep breath. Yegor put a hand lightly on her shoulder, hand gloved, she noticed, and nodded. "Remember," he said. "Midnight."

"Midnight," she agreed, and opened her eyes.

Yegor nodded, and moved away. Minette very nearly asked him where he was going, what he would be doing while all the rest of his little chess pieces scattered to do his bidding, but realised that she was unlikely to receive an answer, and even more unlikely to be told the truth. His shadow sloped across the corridor as he moved back into the depths of the apartment, where the sunlight did not reach; the little girl they called Charity watched him go, her eyes darting.

"Cappie," Minette said, heading out onto the balcony, and then shut her mouth abruptly and averting her eyes upon realising that Levi was shrugging on a shirt and wearing very little underneath. She didn't need a mirror to tell that her face, mask or otherwise, was flaring rose and camellia.

Kasha's laughter was not friendly. The arsonist was peeling off another layer of thin, smoke-stained shirts, and Minette could see now that as slender as the girl had seemed before, her scarred, stitched, sutured skin clung to her bones more tightly than she would have ever realised. The crooked man's daughter seemed unconcerned about Levi or Cappie's presence and her own bare skin, as she knelt by the pile of clothes and began to sort through it to find a new shirt for herself.

"Yeah?" Cappie half-turned towards her, clearly unconcerned about changing into the garb of the locals. With her gift, no one could blame her.

"I'm ready to go," Minette said. "Whenever you are."

The ghost girl nodded. "No point in waiting, right?"

She slipped past Minette, quick and quiet, and Minette was about to follow when Levi said, "Be careful."

Minette glanced, surprised, at him; she was glad to see he had a shirt on now, and was buttoning it, a scatter of rings on his fingers flashing in the gold of dawn. His sunlight butterflies had begun to wither and die in the sky, raining as dying light around them - Kasha held her hands out to gather them as they fell, and closed her fingers over great handfuls of them, crushing and crunching like autumn leaves.

"Careful?" Minette repeated.

He didn't smile. "Careful," he confirmed, and then he and all the rest of the colour drained from the world as Cappie's fingers closed over Minette's.

* * *

 _"He's going to make you soft, girl."_

 _She was stitching his wounds shut, then, her hands still and steady and warm, light across his bruises, feather-light. He got the impression she would have sewn his very mouth and eyes shut if the fancy struck her. He got the impression she still might return him to the pyre if the old man told her to do so._

 _"No," she said. "I don't think he will."_

 _This, then, was friendship._

* * *

There was magic, and there was _magic_. There were cheap parlour tricks, magicians follies performed on the streets and in the markets, sleight of hand with cards and sheets and smoke, illusions of the mind and illusions of the eyes - and there were golden butterflies raining from the sky, voices caught in wooden boxes, shadows reeled out on kite strings to follow and to listen, girls who breathed smoke and coughed sparks.

Everyone in Illea knew the two, and knew the difference.

There was magic and there was _magic._

Unfortunately, James Lawson dealt only in the first kind.

He couldn't complain. Business was good - no matter how much real sorcery existed in the world, it was so often subtle and woven, less magic and more peculiarity, an uncertainty and an ambiguity that hovered at the edge of your mind, less than convinced it was magic rather than just some skill or trick of the light.

No, sometimes people needed a bit of falsity and showmanship, to remind them what a lie looked like.

Well, James was happy to indulge them. What other way had he of whiling away time spent waiting for the rebellion to reach out for him, to find some role for him to play, some part for him to take, to offer him some chance at avenging the girl for whom a false eye marked his skin, to offer him some taste of resistance and rebellion and rising, to offer him some shot at the king? It was just as well to work the streets, to earn some little bit of pocket for himself, to pretend not to notice the way the approving eyes of local girls followed him when he moved, the way they smiled when he did, the way they looked away when he looked at them.

Honduraguan girls were not known for being subtle, it had to be said.

But they were pretty. They wore silks and painted their hands with henna and indikón, dyed their hair bloody with kumkuma and bloodless with ammonia, dripped gold and silver from their throats and ears, and some of them had pockets heavy with gold, so sometimes when he caught them looking he returned the look and enticed them closer and whispered charming words and well.

Of course, it didn't work on every girl. The universe, it seemed, liked to remind him of that fact at frequent intervals.

"Persona non grata," he declared lazily, spilling coins between his fingers.

"Go fuck yourself," Kasha said in reply.

Her shadow, cast across him, was long and very dark; her hair was escaping in loose tendrils from the knot she had woven, a dark bruise blossoming on one hollow cheekbone, something feral and chaotic about the light in her eyes. He remembered thinking she was beautiful when they first met, despite the scar, despite the rumors.

"I heard Dominica burned," James said, and Kasha shrugged.

"Would you believe me if I told you I didn't start it?"

"Are you kidding me?" James laughed. "I bet you ran like hell was on your heels."

She was not, after all, a brave girl.

"It may as well have been."

She offered her hand, callused and scarred, engine oil worn into the crescents of her nails so deep it might never wash out, and he took it and stood while she watched the market. This was not the night market of the evening, where true magic was sold. There were farmers here, merchants, musicians. A more mundane variety of the same.

"So where's Fallon?"

Kasha's gaze, slow and lazy and languid, flicked slowly across James, her eyes sly. It burned where it alighted upon his skin, her gaze. "What makes you think I need Levi?"

"He's your shadow, isn't he?"

"He's my friend."

"You don't have friends."

"No," she agreed wistfully. "But he does."

He doubted that. What friends could the big bad wolf lay claim to? When the moon was fickle and Corbeau smiled with bits of lies between his teeth and the arsonist dripped secrets from her lips like wine, who could you trust?

James had made the right choice, forging his own path.

"What do you want, Kasha?"

She shrugged and turned away as he moved, keeping pace with each of his steps, walking backwards to catch his gaze. "I don't want anything."

James arched an eyebrow. "Nothing?"

"Well," she said, and her look took on a new significance. "I didn't say _that_."

James smirked. "Buy me dinner first."

Kasha's smile grew wide and rather wicked, a thing of edges and angles, no softness in it. "If anyone's going to buy you dinner, it'll be Corbeau."

"Oh," James said, and stopped walking. Kasha wavered for a moment and cocked her head, dark eyes glittering like her sharp, sharp teeth. Dark hair fell over her shoulder, like spilt ink. She said, "Oh?"

"Oh," James repeated. "Oh, no. I don't think so." He held up his hands in mock surrender and shook his head - he was tall enough, two inches taller than Levi Fallon, that he had to look down at the crooked man's daughter as she mimicked him and arched a coal-dark eyebrow. "I'm smart enough," he said. "To stay away from the Corbeaus. All of them, any of them. You should be, too."

"You're one to talk," Kasha said. "I'm not the one who signed up for the crow's crusade."

James blinked. "What?"

The girl shrugged again. She was wearing clothes too large for her - a big woollen jumper, a man's garment, and a white shirt marked with a sooty thumbprint and a scarf stained with smoke. James wondered whose jumper it was. Whether she had stolen it or picked it up off a bedroom floor. Knowing her, maybe it was both. "I'm no one's soldier," Kasha said. "I'm no one's pawn."

"You're here, aren't you?"

"Not for long. I didn't stay in Dominica, and I'm not staying here." She raised one shoulder in a gesture of apathy. "You tell me what I want to hear," she said, her voice low and sweet. "And Yegor gets what he wants and I'm gone. First train north, and never coming back."

North, huh? Not that _north_ told him much - everything was northern to Honduragua. Dominica lay southerly, but Dominica was burning, and infested with hell.

"That," James said. "Is hardly going to persuade me to tell you want to hear, is it?"

Kasha angled her eyes at nothing and sighed out a chuckle. "Yeah?"

A step closer. "Well," he said. "It wouldn't be in my interests to push you away would it?" He caught her wrist and she let him and for a moment he thought he might have succeeded.

"Is that so?" She took another step closer. Another laugh. "Well, I've never really been the _persuading_ sort, Lawson."

And he glimpsed the wolf in the corner of his eye.

And he saw the scar again.

And he remembered whose daughter she was.

"What," James said, and dropped her wrist, "Do you want to know?"

"Annabelle," Kasha said, and James very nearly flinched. Of all the words, of all the names, of all the sounds in the world, only that one could wound. Only that one could remind him of what used to be: of a time before streets and false magic and girls and rebellions and Selection after Selection after Selection.

"What about her?"

"Your sister," Kasha said. "What star was she born under?"

Her eyes were innocent, and her smile was wicked.

"Funny," James spat. "You're really Martinko's, aren't you?"

"So they tell me. Now _you_ tell me. What star?"

Her dark eyes, one near-black and the other wounded and white, looked him right in his mismatched pair. He almost didn't want to look into hers. He had heard stories about men and women who spent too long meeting the crooked man's gaze, and were blinded, or forgot how to breathe, or never looked away again, not until they starved to death. Snake eyes, Annabelle would have called them.

Maybe stories were only stories.

"Alula Borealis," he said softly, and she nodded. "Is that it?"

"Yegor has plans for you," she said, and glanced over her shoulder at Fallon, who moved slowly over towards them from where he had been standing, and waiting, and watching.

If Kasha was a viper, he was a wolf, and that made for an odd, not entirely comfortable pairing. Sometimes James thought they weren't very close or fond of one another at all, only acted so out of habit - even now, Kasha stepped away as Fallon approached, and kept her dark eyes on James as he accepted the sheaf of paper the ex-soldier offered him.

He looked at it.

"What am I looking at?" he asked and Kasha flicked a strand of hair over her shoulder with a shrug.

"Fuck if I know," she said breezily. "I'm done with this nonsense. Finished. You boys can play your games of gunpowder and crowns; I'm going home."

He looked up, at that, a little taken aback and distracted from the mess of runes and symbols marked down on the paper, something between a language of magic and the ravings of a lunatic. And an eye. A dark, inky symbol of an eye staring back. A familiar eye.

"You're crazier than I thought." James shook his head. "Corbeau has his hooks in you now," he said. "He'll reel you back."

"He'll try."

"Kiss for goodbye?"

Kasha adjusted her cuffs.

"Oh, James," she said softly. "I don't kiss dead men."

She turned and walked away. Her shadow was much more sinister than she, long and slender, and if she were any other girl she would have just blended in with the rest. But James kept his eyes on her, nonetheless.

He almost didn't notice the wolf moving past him.

"You know," Fallon said. "She has a boyfriend."

James swept his tongue along his teeth and smiled a trickster's smile, broad and white-toothed. "And I bet that just kills you, huh, Levi?"

Fallon didn't smile - that bastard never did - but he turned and kept walking. He was tall enough that it was easy for him to catch up with Kasha in only a few steps; she turned back to smile at him and take his sleeve, her dark hair splitting sunlight into spectrums along the strands, her scar stark and ugly in the sunlight, and James had to turn away.

Beauty like that brought trouble. The Fabulists had the right idea.

* * *

 _"No riddle was ever told worth solving."_

 _She cupped her hands, small hands, the worn hands of a child, and the old man poured starlight into them, so that gold dripped through her fingers, so that her nails were wreathed in silver, so that her skin stained damask and rufescent. His voice was soft, low, husky, a fire-raiser's voice. He didn't have a name. He didn't need one. She didn't need one either. He folded her fingers in over that light, and told her, very quietly:_

 _"Whoever told you otherwise is a liar."_

 _This, then, was family._


	7. Chapter 7

_Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,_  
 _first as the shadows of fluttering leaves._  
 _Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars._  
 _He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you_  
 _but he thinks_  
 _this is a lie, so he says in the end_  
 _you're dead, nothing can hurt you_  
 _which seems to him_  
 _a more promising beginning, more true._

 **Louise Glück**

* * *

How did one steal a throne?

Crimson had often wondered. But even children know the power of words, the danger of words, the threat of words, and she had never allowed those words to pass her lips, to drip like poison into the air, to rip and render a conversation before it could begin.

 _How? How? How?_

It didn't seem an act for a cutpurse or a pickpocket, a bag-snatcher or a market scavenger; it seemed grander. More dramatic. Steal a crown, steal a throne, steal a kingdom - how, exactly, had the false king done it?

But that wasn't something you could ask when you could not even name the damned criminal. Crimson knew the king's name, although she spoke it not - no one ever did.

 _Xisuthros,_ the liar. _Xisuthros_ , the coward. _Xisuthros_ , the false king and the thief.

Crimson often found herself wondering these things.

Every good fairytale had a princess in a tower, after all, but Crimson found herself tiring of this role, of staring at the stars and waiting for the soft sound of locks clicking open, clickclickclick, like that. Of waiting for orders, for commendation, for some contact from the Corbeau boy who had sent her to hide here, to hide and to wait, to wait and to watch.

She would be safe, Yegor had told her. She would be safe. Well, Crimson didn't exactly believe that. She didn't think that she would have trusted him even if he weren't a Corbeau, even if he wasn't a fox-eyed revolutionary with a liar's mien and the tongue of a snake. She didn't trust him by his very nature. Men like him destroyed. They reaped without sowing. They drew blood without care.

And he had her daughter. Somewhere, out there in the world, Charity was dwelling amongst the vultures and the wolves and the arsonists and the ghosts, and Crimson couldn't protect her, not truly. The only thing she could do for her daughter was hide in the tower and wait for the dragon to come creeping.

And then? Well. Crimson kept a knife in her bodice for a reason, didn't she? And dragons couldn't scare her anymore. Nothing could scare her anymore.

They were going to kill the king. _She_ was going to kill the king. She was sure of it.

And to prove it to herself, she breathed the name, too soft for any raven or dragon to hear, a whisper for her own ears only: " _Xisuthros_."

* * *

Cappie dropped Minette's hand and the world snapped back into being, so sudden it was dizzying - where once there was not, now there was, and it was nauseating: the noise, the sound, the scenta, everything so sharp and awful that Minette couldn't comprehend how she could function everyday in a world that tasted and smelled and sounded like this.

"It's alright," Cappie said, without any true sympathy in her voice - a ghost saying ghostly things. "It'll be alright. Deep breaths."

Minette drew in one deep breath, and then another, dimly aware in the mess of sudden sensations ( _birds singing footsteps crunching wind in the grass her own heart beat thump thump thump_ ) that a man was speaking, and Cappie replying.

"You're certain no one followed you?"

"I'm certain that no one could."

"Come in, quickly. The servant's entrance..."

Cappie took Minette's elbow and helped her brusquely up a set of low steps and through a short, squat doorway. Minette was aware only distantly of colours, shapes, something about stars, as Cappie followed the shadow of a man down a long, narrow hallway.

"Is she alright? Poor girl. No, don't - we can't risk being seen. I'm sorry. The servant's hall."

Down a set of steps this time. Minette wondered if she was reacting poorly to Cappie's particular brand of witchcraft because it was such anathema to her own. Cappie hid behind illusions, rendered herself a ghost, while Minette wove masks and presented a false face to the world.

Or maybe it was just as Cappie said softly to reassure: "It's always hard the first few times."

Minette was eased into a chair, and, blinking rapidly, forced the world into some new semblance of order once more. The man had ushered them into a square room paved with charcoal flagstones and paneled with polished redwood, furnished with a long, wide oak table like one she thought you might find in an old-fashioned castle's banquet hall or ballroom and soft armchairs in each corner. Cappie was perched delicately on the arm of Minette's seat, her arms folded and her eyes unhappy, uncertain, unamused.

And the man was, Minette supposed, Apemios Collins. He had kind eyes. Hair like an aristocrat, albeit dishevelled as though he had not slept the previous night, nor any other in the past week. A broad face with laughter lines along his mouth and eyes. A tailored coat, like Yegor might have worn if he was forty or fifty, and shoes that gleamed.

In other words - hardly a revolutionary.

He was pulling a chair away from the servant's dining table to set it opposite the girls, his eyes serious. "A pleasure to meet you both. Yegor had told me he was sending plenipotentiaries, but I never thought..."

"Revolution," Cappie said with a slight quirk of a smile. "Is the domain of the youthful."

"I won't argue with that," Apemios replied. "And this is the faceless girl?"

"Is that what Yegor calls me?" Minette asked dryly.

"Pay no heed to him. He dwells amongst snakes and drinks venom and expects not to shed his skin." Apemios shook his head. "I don't agree with his plan, but..."

And Minette knew, and she wasn't sure if it made her like Apemios more or less. She was right; he was hardly a revolutionary. He was a benefactor and a funder, a silent supporter, willing to pay for the arms with which Yegor led children and teenagers to death and despair in the name of a fool's crusade. He made the revolution possible, and hid behind his money and the high walls of his estate to do so.

Did that make him a coward or a smart man?

"I'll do anything," Apemios said. "To save her."

"Her?" Minette replied distantly.

"My daughter," Apemios said. "I know you have Fabulists amongst your ranks, but there's been rumours of even their kind being claimed over the past few days and weeks."

"And we," Cappie said, directing her gaze first towards the ground and then slowly, gradually, towards Minette. "Need to put someone on the inside."

Minette took a deep breath and nodded. Yegor had explained as much, but how could she persuade her heart to accept that lone, terrifying fact? She was going into the Selection. She was going to the palace. She was risking her life on the word of a liar. And despite what Yegor had promised her, she wasn't sure she could trust the wolf of Bonita to save her if it came to that.

"Yes," she said. "That's me."

"Venus is on her way down," Apemios said. "And you give me your word you will hide her?"

"We've got plenty of places to hide," Cappie said. "Plenty of safe houses. It's a big world out there, and the royal family won't even be looking for her."

Apemios met Minette's gaze levelly and stoically. "You're certain you can do it?"

Minette hesitated. "Yes," she said.

"Yes," she lied.

She had a feeling she would be doing a lot of that in the next few days and weeks.

Remember midnight, she told herself, remember midnight.

"They'll be coming for her tomorrow," Apemios said, examining the girls as though attempting to see beneath the service. "That gives us this evening to prepare you. If you don't want to do this, though, I can't make you." He didn't use their names. Minette thought he might not have known their names. Wasn't that the safest way to conduct things? Yegor certainly knew his business of destruction. "And I won't blame you for it either. Corbeau should know better than to - Venus, darling, there you are."

Minette turned. If Cappie was a ghost then this girl was a spectre - skin like porcelain and hair like an ink spill tied back in a thick, loose braid lying on one shoulder. She had the body, Minette thought, of a broken bird - thin, tiny, bones protruding at awkward angles like her skeleton was trying to escape from her skin. A little shorter and a little thinner than Minette, but she thought that maybe it was disguisable. It was the face that was the issue - delicate features, almond shaped eyes, thin lips and an upturned nose. It was always easier to work like this - to see the way the light played on the skin and the precise specifications of proportions and features. Putting on Kasha's face had been the first and only time that Minette had attempted to work from a photograph rather than a face-to-face meeting, and she thought it had probably been rather apparent, had fooled no-one; Levi, certainly, had known the truth instantly.

And now, Venus Collins found herself staring herself in the mirror as Minette wove the mask in a single instant and transformed herself.

"Father," Venus said, but her reedy voice was uncertain as she stared at the masked girl. "What did you..."

"It's probably best," Cappie told Apemios. "If we make this as quick and clean as possible."

Apemios nodded, sorrow in his eyes, and Minette had to avert her gaze as the man rose and went to embrace his daughter in farewell. Paternal love, she thought. True paternal love. The kind that she had lost in the moment her father lost his sanity.

"Be careful," Apemios whispered to his daughter, and Cappie clapped Minette on the shoulder with the same words - "be careful."

"I will. And you too."

Cappie rose and went to take Venus' shoulder. Flicking Minette a wink, Cappie and Venus vanished from the world and Minette was left alone, in the face of stranger, facing the Selection.

* * *

"Well, goodbye, then." Kasha pulled her coat tighter around shoulders like sharp blades, her eyes distant and detached as she considered the far-off horizon with a gaze that suggested mutiny. "I'll give your love to Martinko."

"To the crooked man?" Levi was lighting his cigarette, hands cupped around his mouth and a match, close enough to swallow the flame if he so desired. "You know he hates me."

"He doesn't hate you. He just loves me more."

Her smirk had been tenuous enough, like a needle spun of glass, and it shattered now, a scowl returning, when Levi spoke sharply to her.

"You think that's enough to protect you if you go to him? Kasha, you of all people should know: love is just a habit."

"No. Love is a _vice_."

"And?"

"And you already smoke, drink and gamble."

"I don't pretend to know what you're accusing me of."

"Not accusing. Warning." She tossed the words over her shoulder, careless, reckless. "I don't need tarot to know your heartstrings and the tunes they like to follow, sergeant."

Levi took a drag and exhaled, smoke billowing in the cold crisp morning air. "No one ever accused me of loyalty."

"No."

She took his left hand in hers, the way she had the first day they had met.

"You're not," she said. Her voice was low. "Loyal. And you don't owe these people anything."

"Kash..."

"Let someone else die," she said. "Let someone else fall beneath the spokes of Yegor's war-machine. Let someone else fall at his command and bleed for his favour. Because, Levi, you know he's the fool and you know how this story will end, to the very last word, and you know that the Corbeau boys are trouble and they always have been."

"You want me to run," he said. "Like you are."

"Pride is an anchor," Kasha said. "It'll drown you, strangle you, if you let it."

"You," he said quietly. "Of all people should know it isn't pride..."

"Then it's _guilt_ and it's _senseless_."

He stooped and roughly kissed her cheek, wordless, and she glared at him as he did so. Kasha didn't know the meaning of gentleness. She touched his hair as his lips brushed her skin and then she pushed him from her.

Perhaps another girl's eyes would have shone with tears but Kasha was fire incarnate and any sorrow was burned away in the instant it was born. They had repeated this argument for what felt like an eternity. She still thought she had some chance of winning.

"If you die," she said. "I won't visit your grave."

"Burn me, then."

The doors were closing. Smoke and fog were pouring across the station floor as the train prepared to depart. Light was dying on the horizon.

"Give my love to Martinko," Levi said and Kasha shook her head, hair flicking, and turned. She got on the train. The doors slid shut. She did not look back.


	8. Chapter 8

_After the battle, many new ghosts cry,_  
 _The solitary old man worries and grieves._  
 _Ragged clouds are low amid the dusk,_  
 _Snow dances quickly in the whirling wind._

 **\- Du Fu**

* * *

Taja's voice was the merest spectre of a sound, drifting like cold fog across the rooftop as she moved sinously, bonelessly, as though she had no need for the likes of gravity or balance, as though she were moving about on wires and the divine will of the moon itself.

There was no moon visible tonight, wreathed as it was in impenetrable charcoal clouds that had obscured the sky from one horizon to another, neatly veiling the stars. But women like Taja had no need for things as mundane as light by which to move.

"You see them?"

Andromeda's hair was a will-o-the-wisp in the shadows that swallowed the spires of Honduragua, and just like those ghostly fireflies she seemed to promise destruction to any who followed her as she wavered on the edge of the platform and turned her spear in her hand. The tip of the deadly weapon should have gleamed, but there was not enough spare light in the dull early morning to waste on such trivialities. "Not yet." Her voice was not soft, but it was quiet - the muted crack of a champagne flute on marble, Taja thought.

Taja crouched, staring so intently at the street mired in gloom that spots began to float before her eyes, could catch absolutely no glimpse of either Levi or their adversaries. Then again, she hadn't seen Levi all day. Taja trusted Yegor to know what he was doing, what his team was doing, but a splinter of thought in her mind told her that maybe Levi had done the cowardly thing, the uncharacteristic thing, the smart thing and cut and run with the arsonist to the home of the crooked man - to hide in a crypt and wait out the war so that they could sift through the ash and cinders of the society left behind after Yegor and his band of fools had fallen and failed in their task.

Let them, she thought fiercely. Let all of them run. The king could only have one heart, and Taja rarely missed, so if she was the last one standing, willing to fight, then let it be. Let it be. She would let it be.

But Yegor wouldn't let it come to that.

Andromeda's movement on the rosa corssa tiles which paved the rooftops of the wild city awoke Taja from her reverie, and although she knew there had been no change, she still swept her eyes down among the scene before her. Oliver might have believed himself invisible at the window half a block down, still and silent with a sniper rifle aimed firmly at the cobblestones, but Taja saw all.

Taja always saw all.

She tensed her fingers over the arrow she had notched in her elegantly curved bow, and readied herself for quick and certain movement. She knew Oliver was doing the same.

She hated that it had come to this.

The sun had begun to bleed across the horizon, absent one second and present the next, and she shrunk back as though in fear of it as it threatened to touch the rooftops. Taja was more comfortable in the moonlight. She always had been. This time, the twilight of dawn, was unpleasant – neither here nor there, grey like the world Cappie seemed to inhabit with only the occasional tenuous flash of light that could not be trusted, could not be relied upon.

But the prince's entourage moved only at these times, between day and night. The _Selection_ dwelled only within these hours. That was key. They moved in the wake of the sun, a step into the shadows, and Taja knew that Yegor's crew were not the only to acknowledge that fact.

It was a rickshaw that appeared at the corner of the street and moved slowly down the street. Taja had half-expected the men who carried it to be faceless men, skeletons with the skin flayed from them, living corpses like those that were rumoured to guard the Selected girls within the palace. But they were just men, men clad in the silver and gold uniform of the Selection.

The curtains were drawn on the rickshaw. A shadow moved between them, small. Minette, in the face of another.

Taja rarely doubted Yegor, his plans and his schemes, but on this occasion she hoped that Minette would have the sense to die quickly if it came to that.

"Where's the prince?" Andromeda murmured. Oliver must have been thinking the same; he moved, a half-there shade in the window, and readjusted his scope.

"He'll be here," Taja murmured.

A carriage followed the rickshaw, similarly veiled, pulled by dark horses with fine, delicate faces. A girl perched on the roof, her legs knotted beneath her, slim and willowy and a little taller than Taja had expected from the stories. Her dirty blonde hair was thin, her skin approaching porcelain, and although Taja knew the girl to be in her late teens, she appeared far younger, younger even than Kasha.

It took a moment for Taja to spot the pale gold shackles which bound Gaelle Sidonie to the roof of the carriage, but there they were. They looped her wrists and her ankles, and although she seemed peaceable, it was a visible effort for her to move and adjust to the sway of the carriage over cobblestones. Her eyes were closed. Taja wondered if she feared the same nightmares as the rebels.

Oliver would have his scope aimed at her. Taja prayed he would not fire. Not yet. Not until they saw their target. Not until _she_ saw their target.

There. Beyond the street, in one of the many side alleys that split off from the main thoroughfare and spiralled into the labyrinthine maze of the city, a man was moving. Not Levi. Shorter, with golden hair and amber eyes – Aaron Hale.

Leader of the Honduraguan flying battalion. A capable soldier, a true revolutionary spirit and – perhaps most surprisingly of all – a good man.

"There," Andromeda said softly, and Taja let her arrow fly.

It flew true – Taja's arrows usually did.

It struck Aaron Hale in the heart.

Where his heart would have been, had he not been wearing body armour. No doubt makeshift – the rebels rarely had access to anything else.

But he was surprised. That was all the really needed, that surprise. He stepped back, as one often does in surprise, and in that moment the chance was lost for him to attack. The rickshaw passed. The carriage passed.

Gaelle Sidonie, her eyes still closed, turned her head to face the skyline. She turned her face to Andromeda and Taja, and Andromeda let out a breath that suggested she was itching to use her spear.

The chance was lost, but maybe Aaron didn't realise that, because he made to lunge forward, and now Taja saw the gun in his hand and, more than that, she became aware of the life thrumming around them. The other rebels hiding in the shadows - an ambush.

They had probably been waiting for the Selection of a Honduraguan girl for weeks now, maybe months. They had probably been waiting for the chance to descend on the prince like a pack of jackals and tear him limb from limb. They probably thought that the death of the son of an immortal king would make a difference in the world.

Taja knew the truth. The prince would mean nothing. Not today. And she knew that Yegor was secretive and paranoid enough, and the matrix hierarchy of the resistance movement intricate enough, that these local raiders probably had no idea of the plan that had been years in the genesis, their plan, the plan to which Taja and their ilk had pledged their lives and their sanity. Aaron Hale was on their side but Yegor Corbeau was not on his.

And Aaron Hale was a good man who would not grieve for too long if Venus Collins died this morning, but Yegor Corbeau was a liar and a fool who still had plans for Minette Chastain within the gilded cage of the castle.

And that meant they had only one option.

"Stop them," Yegor had told her, and Taja had just nodded.

Andromeda flung her spear and Aaron Hale flung out his arm as though to catch it and instead the spear splintered as it flew, shedding pieces of wood and peelings of iron until all that reached him was the sharp steel head that he caught casually in his hand.

"Now I see why we hired him," Andromeda said darkly, and the dark was lit up by the orange and crimson of muzzle-flashes as Oliver began to fire.

Aaron moved his hand as though to catch each bullet, and each bullet shed its lead casing and its velocity as it moved until it reached Aaron as a useless trinket that bounced from his leather jacket like a handful of thrown gravel. But Oliver was relentless when he set his mind to his task, and for every bullet Aaron could spot and stop there were three more than evaded him and it took only a moment for one to find its target.

Aaron's blood moved in rivulets across the cobblestones, and he fell abruptly, without ceremony, onto the side of the street.

"Is he…?"

Andromeda's whisper was interrupted by the dull explosion of something thrown into the street. It was a curious sensation, that explosion, more felt than heard, and it rippled up through each of Taja's ribs to focus around her heart and force it into a new hollow rhythm as she and Andromeda flattened themselves against the roof to avoid the cataclysm of debris which followed.

Oliver's gun had fallen silent, and for a moment Taja wondered if he had been killed. Smoke choked the scene; she climbed back to her feet and readied another arrow.

The street below was being flooded with men, motley in their uniforms and arms, less _revolutionary_ , more _desperate_ , but they swarmed forth onto nothing. The rickshaw, the carriage, the uniformed men who carried them, the Selected girl and prince contained within – they might as well have dissipated into the smoke.

And yet, from that smoke, nightmares crawled forth.

Without a flicker of hesitation, Taja let her arrow fly. It flew true.

Taja's arrows usually did.

* * *

The quiet aristocracy of the Collins' estate should have tasted like home to Cappie, but it didn't.

It tasted of terror. When one spent as much time in the grey half-world without colour as Cappie did, shielded from the world just as the world was shielded from her, one learned to pick up what one could, the most distant traces of something, and when she looked at the Collins' home she remembered black bags and handcuffs and the distant _thud thud_ of a shotgun.

"Come on," she told Venus, although her voice rippled and dissipated as a shadow through the greyness which filled the world and drowned out all the sharp edges and vibrancy of the universe. The girl was silent. Cappie didn't blame her. It could be overwhelming, sometimes, to be a ghost.

Nithya would not be happy, but she would not complain, and she would not turn the girl away from her door. The rebellion was fueled by money funneled from resentful aristocrats like Venus' father, like Cappie's parents, but Cappie knew that they would not have lasted as long as they had unless they had the support of the ordinary people and the begrudging help offered to them by people like Nithya and Mara Morosova proved that they must. It was a dangerous hobby, to support a rebellion - Cappie couldn't blame Nithya for being hesitant and unhappy with their methods. She was afraid of going the same way as so many, following the same path as Cappie's parents, into an open grave with iron bars across the top.

They walked a different path now, one of the many thread-like back alleys which tangled the city into a mess of houses leaning onto one another and laundry lines curtaining both sides and newly dyed carpets drying over their heads so it was as though they were walking through a tented tunnel which filtered the dusky origins of dawn into a new, lighter greyness. People so often thought Cappie's ghost world was without beauty, without shape or colour, but Cappie was of the opinion those people just refused to look closely enough.

Nithya had the sense to bury herself amongst a crowd and lived in the basement apartment of a towering block which held a dozen families with half a dozen people apiece. In a city like Honduragua, there was always need for a medic, and Cappie doubted that two girls approaching the door would attract much notice but she didn't want to take the risk as she scanned for danger and then pulled Venus to cross the street and ascend the steps to the building.

"You'll be safe here," she murmured. "Just do as Nithya tells you. And forget you ever met us. Any of us."

"Thank you, Diantha," Venus said softly and Cappie jerked her hand back abruptly, hurtling the both of them back into the real world and all of its intensity, everything that demanded to be seen and heard and felt and her head throbbed and her blood burned with the sheer _pressure_ of the world that suddenly existed around her and demanded, demanded, _demanded._

"What did you call me?"

"Call yourself what you want," Venus said softly. "The stars will always know the truth."

Her mother had worn seven pleats in her navy blue pencil skirt. Her father had been heedless of the pollen in his mustache as it twitched with a smile. Diantha had been dizzy with spinning and the sky had spun with her.

That day -

"Then tell me," Cappie said tightly. "Do the stars know whether the king dies?"

"Many kings shall," Venus replied.

Cappie spun on her heel and walked away, distantly aware of Nithya opening the door behind her and pulling the delicate Venus into the safe house. They would be safe, Cappie thought. That could be guaranteed - unlike Minette's safety. Unlike Cappie's.

Because she _was_ Cappie. Diantha had faded from the world and drowned in that charcoal alien dimension and Cappie had returned to take her place, full of revolutionary fervour. The girl they had called Diantha wouldn't have had the strength to oppose the false king's regime. The girl they called Cappie was going to raze everything he held dear - if he even had a heart - to the ground.

Cappie, after all, was a ghost.

* * *

Adelaide was dead.

Oliver knew Adelaide to be dead.

It did not make it any easier to kill her for a second time.

But he did.

Oliver Tyrrell did not appreciate his sister's face being used like that, to attack, to provoke, and although he could not deny that it had worked - his skull seemed to have tightened over his eyes with rage, every movement an extension of purpose, to kill the people who had done that to her - he knew that it would be the last time Gaelle Sidonie would make the mistake of believing that wrath would make him careless.

No, Oliver fed off that rage, and now he moved surely.

Down the stairs, still wreathed in smoke from the explosion on the street, and over the rubble which had imploded through the outer wall of the ancient building to land recklessly in the stairwell, incongruent in its mosaiced surroundings. The door had been damaged badly, hanging loosely on a single hinge, and Oliver damaged it worse still with a powerful stab of the butt of his gun, sending it the rest of the way. He climbed over the collapsed compound wall. He stepped over the body of a fallen Honduraguan rebel.

Down the street.

He reloaded the gun as he went.

Monsters took many forms, and the kind that lunged at him, peeled from the shadows, wrought from illusions with enough magic behind them to hurt when they hit you, were the most basic of all: the kind of visceral and twisted shapes that frightened without substance, were terrifying for what they were rather than what they meant, the kind with too many eyes and too many teeth and flesh hanging off them in strips.

Oliver was not perturbed by this kind of shallow horror.

Sidonie was good when she knew what she was doing but she had underestimated Oliver Tyrrell.

And he had known Adelaide to be dead. That fact had kept him company for many long, cold years, the knowledge that his family was gone and the Selection the cause and he far from home, kept from the familiar shores of Britannia by the barbed wire grip of the false king without purpose and without path except to avenge.

Because he had known Adelaide to be dead.

Illusions couldn't fool you if you knew the truth behind them.

And yet when the girl appeared before him, he stopped.

He had seen her, as he monitored the palace, had watched her watch the stars and wondered if she would jump.

And now she stood between him and his quarry.

Hair like the feathers of a raven, lips as red as blood, eyelashes like coal. Small. Petite. _Fragile._ And alive.

Was she alive?

Gaelle Sidonie's eyes glinted behind the girl, blue and green, and Oliver wavered. For that split second.

Long enough for a knife to bury itself in Sidonie's sternum, a certain and solid throw that cracked the bone.

The star-gazer blinked in and out of existence as Sidonie shook on the edge of falling. And then she did fall, and all the threads woven to form the dark-haired illusion began to unravel, bit by tenuous bit. Her hazel eyes were the last to go. By the time the illusion had collapsed completely, Levi had joined Oliver, adjusting the cuffs of his soldier's coat as he glanced down at his kill.

Not a kill. Sidonie stirred, still shackled to the overturned carcass of the carriage. Empty. No prince, no Minette. Oliver hoped that meant they were safe - that they had got away.

"A knife?" Oliver's voice was scorched.

Levi's tone was unabashed. "I ran out of bullets."

Of course. This was Levi Fallon. Oliver wondered how many of the Honduraguan rebels still drew breath.

He turned away wordlessly and left the wolf of Bonita looking down at the nightmare weaver. Taja and Andromeda had joined them on the street. Andromeda's boots were stained with ash and blood. The quiver on Taja's back was empty. The wounded and well of the revolutionary forces, their brothers in arms, had fled.

Only those foolish enough to follow Yegor's crusade remained behind, wreathed in smoke and fire.

* * *

They called her the arsonist, the devil's daughter, the wolf tamer.

"Why?"

Kasha had shrugged. "I don't know. Kasha isn't exactly hard to pronounce."

Yegor was not surprised to hear that she had run.

He had expected nothing less, to be honest. They called her the arsonist, the devil's daughter, the wolf tamer, and Yegor had met her on her way out of the apartment earlier in the day, still wearing one of Levi's jackets and with a knife hidden in her boot. She didn't seem happy to see him - probably thought he would try to talk her out of leaving.

Yegor remembered first asking her to wake Levi, and wondering why she alone was trusted to know where he lay. He wasn't used to not knowing things, but he still didn't know. The arsonist was just that - an ordinary, scarred, selfish girl. A true revolutionary, in a way.

They were better off without her, then.

He wondered where she was. How long she would make it on her own.

"The evil queen," Kasha had said. Yegor no longer felt the need to recoil when Kasha fixed her lone dark eye upon him, the other blind and filmed with white. She gripped his arm as well - she had long, thin fingers like the limbs of a spider. The pads of her fingertips were as rough as sandpaper. "In all the stories, she tears hearts out."

"Yes," Yegor had said.

"Please be first in line," the arsonist had told him and Yegor had very nearly laughed. "You're still – "

She paused, and arched a thick dark eyebrow. "Unnecessary," she answered herself.

"Don't worry," he said. "This mission will still take everyone."

She had looked doubtful. Yegor couldn't blame her. She knew him now as a liar, and liars rarely went to the front of the pack. If the puppet-master let you see the strings, well, he wasn't worth much as a puppet-master.

"If anything happens to you," Kasha said. "Taja will be heartbroken."

Yegor's expression had not changed. "That's the plan."

Levi was waiting outside.

"Storm's brewing," Kasha had said softly. "Move your pieces wisely."

She dropped his arm and spoke as she left. "And long live the king."

Not much longer. Yegor nearly had all of his pieces where he wanted them: Crimson in her tower and Minette in her cage, Taja at his shoulder and the rest, Andromeda and Oliver and Levi, still to take their places but ready to move.

Yegor had promised Oliver three days. The first was dawning. He rather thought they would be ahead of schedule.

* * *

When Minette stirred from her long sleep, it was only reluctantly. Consciousness returned to her begrudgingly, retreating at first and then surging around her so that she was suddenly aware that she was no longer in the home of the Collins.

She had dreamed of a rickshaw, and of crows descending en mass from a sky full of crows so that the world was blackened as surely as something burnt and useless. And she had dreamed of a prince with flaxen hair and glass for eyes, and she had dreamed of a wolf in the skin of a man with gold moths littering his arms, stained with blood. And she had dreamed that a fox had stolen her tongue and disappeared beyond her, into the house she had been born in, the house in which she had lived with her mother and her father and her brothers, and although she had tried to follow she could not.

And then she had awoken, and dreamed no more.

She was inside the palace. She was one of the Selected. She was within a few hundred meters of the king.

And she awoke to the sound of her bedroom door unlocking.

* * *

 **Sorry for the delay! I've been really busy with exams and so on, so the next chapter may be similarly delayed, and then I hope to get back into a regular rhythm. The last chapter or so have been rather expositional and slow-paced, so I hope you all enjoyed the leap forward in action here!**

 **Once again - thank you all so, so much for your reviews. It means more than I can say that you guys give my story even a few minutes of your time, and I hope that I do not disappoint. As usual, please don't hesitate to tell me what you think, any of your theories, or any improvements that could be made!**


	9. Chapter 9

_On an autumn day I met her first and knew  
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;  
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,  
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day._

 _On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now_  
 _Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow_  
 _That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay -  
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day._

 ** _-_ Patrick Kavanagh**

* * *

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you." The voice was flute, the tone behind it crisp and cold, a thing of beauty detached from its source, snowflakes in a grey sky. "I wasn't certain if you would be awake."

The girl who appeared around the door was delicate and precise, small and very slender, so tiny that she seemed at risk of being crushed by the sheer weight of the world around her. And she was all the smaller in the towering magnificence of the palatial room. The roof, fretted with gold fire, appeared exceptionally far away from where Minette lay in the bed; the walls, framed in thick dull butterscotch curtains, rose high and stretched wide; the bed in which she lay was wide and soft and unfamiliar, and as she moved groggily from the pillow the girl at the door moved slowly to approach, red silk swaying about long pale legs.

"Venus," the girl said.

"Yes," Minette said uncertainly, hoping that her unease and unfamiliarity with dealing with the stranger's name could be excused away by the wariness and uncertainty that were natural by-products of being Selected. "Yes."

"Mrtvola," the girl said.

She did not offer her a hand. Her hazel eyes were steely, her hair raven, and her skin marble – she could have been a statue from antiquity, a spurned demigoddess with wrath beneath the surface or some legendary queen without elemental concerns: air, water, warmth.

"I was sent to fetch you," Mrtvola said. "For a royal viewing."

"I see," Minette said cautiously.

"I'll give you a moment to prepare," said the girl. "The dress in the closet. Don't take too long."

She was as good as her word, and as swift at disappearing as appearing in the first place; Minette was left alone in the cavernous room that reminded her more of some royal morgue, the tomb for some long dead emira, than a bedroom for a living, breathing girl. She lay there for a moment, almost afraid to stir for fear of disturbing the silence which permeated the entire empty space.

Eventually, however, she rose, and moved towards the closet indicated; although to call it a mere _closet_ seemed an insult, so rich was its wood, so fine the gold of its handles and hinges. They were not a subtle group here, she thought distantly – she had expected something more macabre, but everything was pale and gleaming, absent blood or bone or traces of awfulness as she had expected. Even the dress was nice, if needlessly showy – made of some kind of clinging silk and chiffon that flared into a wider skirt, it was clouded with silvery stars, more densely around the chest and heart, more dispersed along the hem. She liked it. She wasn't sure she should.

She studied her reflection in the mirror of the door to ensure that all was as it should be, and no threads had come unravelled during the night. She could not have slept more than a few hours, though she could not tell precisely what time it was; it took her a moment to realise that the windows were not windows at all but mere paintings of a world beyond, landscapes both foreign and familiar – one a cityscape like Angeles, a skyline studded with flickering lights and another a long, jagged line of mountainous crags, all sand and limestone. There was something grotesque about the wearied falsity, the half-hearted attempt to render a semblance of freedom.

She dressed quickly – the cloth slipped through her fingers like flowing water, light and insubstantial, like something a ghost might deem too thin – and left her fingers in a folded pile on the bed, uncertain of what precisely the protocol was for these kind of situations, and rather doubted the clothes would still be there when she returned again. A quick search of the pockets gave up nothing to incriminate her or the others; nonetheless, leaving the sundress and cardigan behind rather felt like a final sacrifice of Minette, and all her freedom to run and hide, leaving her with only Venus, trapped like a rat within a maze.

No sooner had she finished dressing, leaving Venus' hair in strands around her shoulders, than she heard the staccato of locks being undone again, and Mrtvola appeared to gesture Minette through the door with a single glance. Pausing only to slip on the shoes which had been left neatly beside the rug, the masked girl followed; the corridor outside seemed to have entirely abandoned the pretence of glamour, preferring instead to exude the aura of a medieval dungeon carpeted by flagstones, wallpapered by slate, dotted by similar slab wood doors spaced every few metres. She wondered if each held a Selected girl. She wondered where they were, of what they were thinking.

Similar corridors seemed to spider out into all directions, more of them now as the walls grew gold and silver and the slate gave way to marble, as the dull dim flicker of poor lighting became the soft glow of opulence, and the prison around her gave way to something decidedly more palatial – Minette barely noticed the transformation until it was complete. The narrow hall in which they were walking opened onto a much larger foyer, from which a dozen similar corridors spiralled, and from each came a Selected girl, following behind their own grey, unhappy-looking servant. Minette wondered if they were all called Mrtvola, and if any of them breathed. Then they were walking together in a long line, and Minette did not have to think before adjusting her pace to match the others as they fell into a neatly-spaced line, two abreast, walking swiftly and silently, dresses rustling and heels clicking, each girl directing their gaze directly ahead into the distance.

Into the ballroom with them – the press of humanity around her, the only sign she had glimpsed thus far of such a thing, was so overwhelming in its scarcity, a mere thirty four girls, that Minette barely got the chance to look around. The lines in which they stood were as regimented as the one in which they had walked; Minette did not even wish to look to either side for fear that an action out of the ordinary might draw the more unpleasant kind of attention to her.

There was stillness. There was silence.

There was silence. There was stillness.

A movement beside her – the dark-haired girl tilting her head towards the roof as though to experience the first drops of a spring monsoon on the tips of her eyelashes. Not just her – the others as well, all turning their gaze towards what might have once been a sky.

A balcony ran the length of the room, a wrought iron railing sheltered by velvet crimson curtains.

Footsteps.

And there, on the balcony, stood the prince.

* * *

Iliya could not remember becoming a guard.

Hadn't he always been a guard? Hadn't he always walked these ramparts, silent and watchful and choking on snow and fog? He protected the monsters in _here_ from the monsters out _there_ , and he protected the beasts out _there_ from the beasts which dwelled in _here_.

Did it matter when or where or how or why he had become so, when the fact was that he was so?

There were many of them. Some of them only wore silver and gold; others, scarlet and ash, war colours. Dark blue, sometimes, if they came and they went. They wore their blood on the wrong side of their skin, most of them.

Like Iliya.

Iliya could not remember becoming a guard.

But Iliya could remember dying.

* * *

"I had a nightmare."

Oliver had found himself wondering more often than he would have like precisely whose child Charity was. The young girl was merely present, constantly, and Yegor seemed disinclined to permit her escape the confines of the safehouse. It was difficult for Oliver to comprehend Yegor as any kind of a father, and Taja appeared disinclined to offer any information on the matter, regarding the child with dark eyes as one might a bleached skull in a field - accepting that it is a natural thing, and disliking it all the same - before disappearing into one of the back rooms to wash the blood out of her hair, off her hands. Cappie, looking none too happy about the use of violence against their comrades-in-arms and even less happy that she had not been involved, had not been consulted, had gone with Andromeda to scour the city for some hint of whether Aaron Hale lived or died, and precisely what had become of the Selected contingent, Minette and Sidonie and the prince included. Oliver supposed that left him as some kind of _loco parentis_.

Oliver said, "did you?"

She nodded sombrely. Oliver offered her his hand, and she took it; she was small, even for her age.

"What kind of nightmare?"

"My mother," she said, and her eyebrows drew together tightly and she fell silent as though her tongue had knotted similarly.

"It's just a dream," Oliver said, but she did not seem inclined to take the stranger at his word, so after a brief moment he rose and went with the girl into the small living room where Andromeda had nearly bled to death on her first day in the city. Someone had set up a small futon for the girl - Oliver was inclined to believe Minette or Cappie - with pillows and blankets strewn about into the semblance of a net.

"What happened?" the girl asked.

"Happened?" Oliver repeated, sitting down on the ground as Charity fumbled her way back into the makeshift bed. He wondered if it had been this way with Adelaide, when she had cared for him, looked after him, raised him - if she had believed him delicate and breakable and whether she had believed the world around him to be a thing of cloak-and-dagger, smoke-and-mirror, blood-and-bone.

"I had a nightmare," Charity said again. " About you."

"I thought you said it was about your mother."

"There was a witch," the girl said, and traced a long line down the sign of her face, across her eye, turning the corner of her lip down as her nail touched it as though to simulate a mutilation. "And a bird."

"Of course," Oliver said. "The witch."

"You know her?"

"I've known my fair share."

He smiled and that seemed to incline the young girl to smile also. The apartment was quiet and cold, lit in cool dim light that left strange shadows flickering on the walls; a lone golden butterfly survived on the wall by the door, moving slowly in the currents of air, as fragile as a creature of spun sugar. Yegor's pacing had fallen silent; the faintest strains of music floated in from the balcony, where Levi was shuffling cards and drinking whiskey and smoking, trying to fit a lifetime of sins and vices into a few scarce hours as though they would be his last.

"Tell me," she commanded with the air of one who is accustomed to the adoration of those who loved her and was not certain if anyone loved her anymore.

"About a witch?"

Charity's silent gaze was the only answer he received and he relented.

"When I was growing up in Britannia," Oliver said. "We lived on one side of the street, my sister and I, and the witch lived on the other. The witch," Oliver said. "Was very evil, and very beautiful."

"Both?"

"One follows another."

Charity seemed rather dubious at this proclamation.

"And the witch," Oliver said. "Tore hearts out, the hearts of little girls and young maidens and old crimes, and sold them on the market, every Thursday evening - if you listened carefully you could hear her ringing her bell at about six o'clock, to call the warlocks to see and to buy the hearts while they were still fresh."

"Did they steal your heart?"

"I don't have one."

"Your sister's?"

"Ah," Oliver said. "That's the thing, isn't it? Now, one day the witch tried to. She lured you in with crow feathers and fox prints, this witch - you'd walk down the street, and see the most beautiful feather you had ever seen, all the colours imaginable shining on the surface and even a few you had never encountered before, and then another, twice as beautiful a few feet away... Or else you'd wake up in your bed with sugar scattered across your floor and fox-prints moving through them. But after the witch had stolen many hearts, many, many hearts, people began to know her tricks, her way of luring and deceiving."

"Like Yegor," Charity said, and Oliver grinned.

" _Exactly_ like Yegor. So this witch had to come up with another cleas, another plan, to steal hearts from little girls and young maidens and old crones. And she decided that she would transform herself into a snake, and slither into the homes and gardens of these people while they slept. One day she saw my sister chopping wood in the garden, and the witch became a snake and... under the garden gate she went... up the steps she went... across the lawn she went..."

Charity's eyes were a waning moon, wide and glimmering in the wan light, appearing vaguely distraught and Oliver reminded himself that his honeyed words were more of a risk here than any non-existent storytelling prowess. People tended to take his words as truth, no matter how fanciful, and as much as he typically prided himself on that skill, he didn't exactly want to leave this girl fretting over imagined intrusion of snake-witches with feathers in her hair and fox paws for feet.

"And then?" The girl's tone was hushed.

"My sister cut her head off with her axe," Oliver said simply.

"Really?"

"Of course. It's the only way to deal with a witch. They don't have hearts, you see; that's why Fallon keeps his knife with him on the balcony. If he sees any witches climbing up here, Charity, he'll cut their heads off before they can even set foot over the threshold."

Charity looked relieved. Oliver offered a smile that was returned tentatively, but as Oliver went to rise and move away a small hand darted out and caught his sleeve. "Please don't go."

Oliver nearly rolled his eyes. "Why not?"

Charity blinked, childish eyes large and sweet. "I can't sleep."

"Yes," Oliver said softly, and this time there was force behind his words, a gentle pressure, the syllables threaded with magic and the sounds woven with legerdemain until they were less words than invocations. "You can."

Charity blinked again, slower this time.

"Go to sleep," Oliver said gently, and freed his hand from the girl's weakening grip. "You won't have any more nightmares."

He smoothed some curls back from her face and wondered what Adelaide would have done in the same situation.

"Go to sleep," he whispered, and the girl wavered, eyelids fluttering shut, and when she slumped against the blankets it was the sleep of the near-dead that had claimed her and he knew it would be dreamless.

The music on the balcony was soft, but as he stepped out of the living room he caught the faintest few notes from it; Levi had a music box balanced on the railing, but didn't seem to be listening to the husky voice that spilt from it.

" _...y_ _ī zhǐ dúláng, yī zhǐ dúshé, ài jiéchéng, dào jiéchéng..._ "

Snakes and wolves and love and wounding. Oliver's life seemed to run along familiar payterns, adhere to familiar themes, as of late. With a slight sigh he returned to the table and to the cleaning of his rifle. If any witches arrived unexpectedly, after all, he would have to be ready for them.

* * *

The prince was gone almost as soon as he had arrived. The mere flicker of a figure on the balcony, looking down at them with very dark eyes, and then he was gone again leaving only the trace of gold hanging in the air, like a spectre of half-formed memory and light. Minette almost wasn't certain she had indeed seen him, until she risked a glimpse to her right and caught sight of the rapt expression on her neighbour's upturned alabaster face.

There was silence in the room for a moment, which was broken by the dark-haired girl at Minette's elbow.

"Oh, wasn't that just a _dream_?"

She seemed to be the only girl who thought so - the other girls, Minette noted, looked absolutely terrified, their faces drawn and tired, their eyes dark and raw, their lips swollen. The only girl which did not appear so was at the head of the line, looking coolly stoic beneath her cloud of cork-screw curls. When she turned her head to throw a look at derision at the dark-haired enthusiast, Minette saw that the afro'd girl was a Fabulist, closer to Minette's brands than Kasha's brutal scar - she had burned, very precisely, patches of the skin about her eye and lip, twisting them into patches of melted skin, which didn't make her ugly enough not to be beautiful. She was beautiful, and cold in that beauty - her dark eyes were unforgiving as they bored into Minette's neighbour, who didn't seem to have noticed she was alone in her sentiments.

"New," she was saying to Minette with a smile that was as sweet as sugar. "Aren't you? The thirty-fourth girl."

"Yes," Minette agreed distantly, her eyes still moving between the balcony where the prince had stood and the other Selected girls around her. "Yes, I am. Venus."

The girl was a study in contrasts and beauty, ink on a blank page, a monochromatic chess-board, a raven against a grey sky with lips as red as blood. "Acacia," she replied, tucking a strand of ebony hair behind her ear. Her dress was identical to Minette's in design but vastly varied in colour and pattern - closer to the grain of a goose feather or swan wing, speckled with scarlet and crimson and bronze like autumn leaves.

She did not offer her hand, so Minette did not offer hers. Minette was a quick learner. You had to be when you could swap faces at a whim.

"Thirty four?" Minette repeated, and Acacia glanced around as though to check no-one was listening, and then seemed to think better of speaking whatsoever and fixed her gaze forward once more.

The girl behind Minette spoke - Minette did not dare look back to catch a glimpse. "He's already eliminated one."

 _Eliminated_ \- so cold, so clinical, so final and so possible, such an imminent future for Minette that for a moment she could see it before her, unfurling as a golden line before her, a destiny unavoidable no matter what Yegor promised. This was a dangerous place, all the more dangerous for the gold and silver in which it robed itself, and the girls around her seemed to recognise that fact as well as she.

Well, everyone except Acacia.

There was bound to be a few odd girls everywhere.

"Ignore Kgetha over there," Acacia continued, indicating the Fabulist. "She looks at everyone like that."

Perhaps, the masked girl thought, Kgetha was right to be suspicious.

Minette remembered what Yegor had promised her - that Levi would be close by, in all his wolfishness, and that he would not allow anything to happen to her, that single-minded Oliver would be hovering at the very edge of the image prepared to act, that Andromeda would be present when she was needed to be present - but it did not and could not assure her.

Because Honduragua was very far away.

Because Minette was very alone.

Because the ballroom was very empty, but for the Selected girls awaiting elimination.

There must have been some invisible signal, because the two girls at the front of the line, Kgetha and a freckled red-head, and the pair at the rear of the line, two lanky New Asian girls, began to move away, accompanied by their silent grey servants. Minette watched them go from the corner of her eye; only once the ballroom doors had swung shut behind the four girls did the next two pairs begin to move, and so the line slowly began to dwindle. When it came Minette's turn to leave, Acacia grasped her arm and flashed her another friendly smile.

"You mustn't be scared," she said softly, so softly that Minette thought only she and hell could hear the words. "Fear won't help, will it? We're here now."

Minette nodded, and they moved towards the doors, beyond which they went their separate ways, down separate winding corridors. It took Minette a few moments, so unfamiliar was she with the labyrinthine layout of the palace, to realise that they were going downwards, not upwards, and definitely not returning to the room in which she had awoken.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than it was answered by the expressionless Mrtvola.

"The prince requests a meeting," she said, unsmiling, and Minette felt her heart constrict, as though in a vice, as they descended into the bowels of the castle, leaving all light behind.


	10. Chapter 10

_The sniper at work over the street corner acts._  
 _A girl, breathless after the dash across,_  
 _radiates heat and bouquets. She explodes, rages,_  
 _curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly,_  
 _I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words_  
 _like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning,_  
 _on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head_  
 _back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair_  
 _sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never_  
 _misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy_  
 _costs them nothing. Those half-smiles saying_  
 _you aren't just one fact among others—not at all,_  
 _not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact_  
 _if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up._  
 _The air smelt strongly of my distant youth_  
 _when every boulevard led to the end of the world,_  
 _when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb."_  
 _Now she's going, leaving such tenderness in me_  
 _as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens_  
 _into which snowflakes are swarming._  
 _So she disappeared, not a girl_  
 _but a breeze, blown lightly, surprisingly,_  
 _through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat_  
 _of being._

\- **Marko Vesovic**

* * *

Levi was already asleep when Oliver boarded the last passenger car of the train due north-west at the Honduraguan border. The New Asian soldier was out on the open balcony that protruded from the back of the car with one long leg propped on the railing, head tilted towards the light exuding from the busier cars. It was a cliche, Oliver thought, but he did look younger, less wolfish like this. Almost normal, if not for the shadows under his eyes, the blood on his breath.

Or perhaps he wasn't asleep, because as Oliver approached he saw the flicker of the other man's eyelashes and realised he was awake and watching, and could not help but wonder if the wolf of Bonita ever slept. He wondered if he was lonely without Kasha. Were they friends? They didn't act like friends. But she knew where he slept - perhaps that secret bound them together in something other than friendship. Oliver had realised the crooked girl was leaving until she was gone, and could not bring himself to mourn her departure very much.

"What did you see?"

Levi's eyes were very steady. "Same as you."

"Bullshit," said Oliver and Levi's mouth quirked into something approaching a smile as he raised his arm and offered the other man a glass of amber liquid, a twin of the one in his hand that seemed well-worn.

"Perhaps," he said, and Oliver accepted that as perhaps the closest he would come to an answer and accepted the whiskey even as he moved to sit on the other side of the door. The world retreated rapidly before them - he could see the burning edges of Honduragua in the distance, glimmering with fireworks and lamplight. Beyond, where once had laid the oasis of life of island Dominica, was darkness. They had finally doused the fires which had raged there for several days. The prince had seen to it personally, with Gaëlle Sidonie at his heels, that nothing had survived its razing.

Arsonists like Kasha tended to bring fire in their wake. She had gone north, Oliver thought, or, at least, the crooked man was in the north and she had gone to the crooked man. He wasn't certain a creature so cold-blooded would or could survive long amidst the ice. Yegor didn't seem to miss her. Minette was in the Selection, Oliver and Levi moving to take their positions in the centre of the kingdom where James Lawson waited, and the others going to their roles. Yegor's curse was that of a revolutionary: let no one know the full plan. Always keep them guessing. Always, always. Never trust anyone.

Oliver thought he could sympathise with that.

"What did you see?" Levi echoed his words, and Oliver found himself realising just how those words grated against the mind only when they were turned against him in turn. He shrugged, and drank rather than answer. Levi didn't smile.

"I thought so," he said.

The stars were very faded tonight, he thought, an anemic light that raged against the dark that threatened to close in tight but which faltered, flickered and faded behind the smoky clouds which wreathed the horizon, the sky, everything.

"Love sucks," Oliver said, rather distantly as he shook his head, his voice low, and Levi made a sound like a stillborn laugh.

"Say it again," he said, and raised his glass to tip the edge against Oliver's.

"To the rebellion," Oliver said. "And to the crow's crusade."

* * *

The child loved to fade. Cappie supposed when you were young and unafraid of death, the prospect of losing your grip on the world was not so frightening. It frightened Taja, she knew, whenever Cappie drew the wolf-girl into that shadowy ghost world of invisibility, because Taja knew what it was to lose your grip on the light. Taja knew the bottom. She knew what lay at the pit.

The child did not seem to know any such thing, so Cappie indulged her - now that Levi was no longer around to conjure golden butterflies and bronze dragonflies and need which buzzed gold-vermilion, the only thing that seemed to distract the girl from the business of conspiracy and crime around her were those moments in which Cappie seized up her tiny doll-like hands and spun with her until the world blurred, and then blurred the world into a grey nothingness, and the drained even that nothingness of its grey until it was nothing - not black, not white, just the essence of invisibility. The stuff that stars were made of. And then Cappie would let go and allow the girl to go tumbling back into being, suddenly and shockingly, and there would be laughter.

Cappie thought she rather would have liked a little sister like Charity Martinez.

But if she had a sister, she would have a dead sister, and to have no sister was better than to have _that_.

Yegor had a sister, she thought, and Oliver had a sister, dead sisters the both of them, and Kasha had murdered her own twin brother (or so the rumour to the east went, if you cared to listen to liars), and the rest were orphans, self-chosen, self-made or self-possessed. This girl was probably an orphan as well. Maybe she didn't know yet what she was. Cappie found that most people didn't know much about themselves when they really stopped to think.

"Again?" Cappie asked, and the world vanished and for a moment they were shadows once more, all glavelight and ghostlight and greylight, all monochrome and greyscale and chiaroscuro. A shadow moved in front of them – Yegor, orchestrating the murder of a king and the deaths of all who followed him. He looked little different in black-and-white; after all, Cappie thought, the Corbeau boy had very little colour to spare. He answered the door; the spectre of Taja moved from the door into the backroom, and Cappie watched her go.

Back into the world she tumbled, and Charity tumbled with her, and Yegor turned towards them only to arch an eyebrow and curl his lip. "So bored with revolution, Diantha?"

"Don't call me that," Cappie said mildly, helping the girl to her feet. "That's not my name."

"So it shouldn't matter. _What's a name?_ _It is nor hand, nor foot,_ _n_ _or arm, nor face, nor any other part_ _b_ _elonging to a man..._ "

"You sound like Levi."

"A sin to be sure."

Cappie watched the Corbeau boy and was silent, strangely, for a moment, before she held her hands out to Charity once more. "Well, this isn't revolution. This is murder. And it's alright to be bored with murder, isn't it?" She smiled at the little girl, and her golden hair was a halo about her head in that moment, bright and glowing. "Once more unto the breach, little sparrow? We'll make you a crow-ghost yet."

* * *

So the rumours were true.

Or at least, this was a kind of truth. Since joining the rebellion, Minette had grown familiar with the mutable, changeable, intenable nature of the _truth_. Everyone spoke their own truth. It may not have been real, but it was _true._

Well, this was real. The sleeping girl was as pale and as gaunt as a corpse, her skin waxy as a lily petal in the facsimile of death. Her eyelids were campanula and columbine, blue enough to appear painted so, as though one of the master artists of Illea had conspired to compose the most beautiful carcass that had ever existed.

Even Minette, who had worn more masks than she had ever cared to count, who had composed threads of faces beautiful and ugly and mutilated and unusual and bland, had never seen a face quite like this one.

She imagined that her eyes would be amber and green, like gold coins spilled amongst sprouting grass, like emeralds dropped in honey. Her eyelashes, long and thick, were dark, like kohl, like coal, like char. But most strange of all: the girl had, as was said, rose petals where should be hair.

So the rumours were true.

They did not belong to a red rose. Minette had never stopped to think what other colour those petals might be, but they were not red – they were lavender and white, fragmented where they grew long as though they had withered from age, fresh and soft nearest her scalp. The lavender was pale, like wisteria and periwinkle, and the white was bright and flawless, absolutely unblemished and pristine. The petals reached her shoulders and curled, slightly.

Her lips, though, they were rose-red, her skin snow-white.

And she lay, indeed, within a glass coffin, dressed in a lace slip the colour of amaranth and quartz, the soft lacy fabric of which moved gently about graciley slender limbs as though in an invisible breeze. Her fingers, curled gently at her side, were tipped with pale crescent nails small enough to belong to a child.

So the rumours were true.

Minette let out a wisp of breath and watched the petals move in that nonexistent zephyr. She did not move she didn't think she could. And she didn't think she could speak until the words slipped from her lips: "So the rumours were true."

"Indeed." The prince was a silent presence, without even that warmth of another life to maintain Minette's awareness of where he was, of how he held himself. She wasn't sure if he was even breathing until he spoke. "I just wanted to... let you know."

"Let me know?"

"That it would be pointless to try to kill me when we have Altansarnai to drag my bones back from hell."

Minette felt her blood go cold in her veins. He knew. He knew. Did he know? She was beneath the ground, beneath the castle, far from the sky where the crows might spot her when she died. Yegor had promised her, Levi had promised her, that the wolf of Bonita would be close by, in all his viciousness, and that he would not all anything to happen to her – but Yegor was a liar.

She felt her breath catch in her throat, a fly in the web of a spider, and was silent, her body frozen, and then the prince laughed, a sharp and cruel sound like the snapping of ice, a sound like Kasha and her scar, and then Minette heard his footsteps retreating, moving away, and leaving Minette silent next to the glass coffin in which lay the rose-haired girl.

"Just a thought," the prince called, his voice languid and lazy and heavy with wealth, and he left Minette stared at the dead face of the sleeping beauty before her.


	11. Chapter 11

_So two nights passed : the night's dismay_  
 _Saddened and stunned the coming day._  
 _Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me_  
 _Distemper's worst calamity._  
 _The third night, when my own loud scream_  
 _Had waked me from the fiendish dream,_  
 _O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,_  
 _I wept as I had been a child ;_  
 _And having thus by tears subdued_  
 _My anguish to a milder mood,_  
 _Such punishments, I said, were due_  
 _To natures deepliest stained with sin,-_  
 _For aye entempesting anew_  
 _The unfathomable hell within,_  
 _The horror of their deeds to view,_  
 _To know and loathe, yet wish and do !_  
 _Such griefs with such men well agree,_  
 _But wherefore, wherefore fall on me ?_  
 _To be beloved is all I need,_  
 _And whom I love, I love indeed._

 **\- Samuel Taylor Coleridge**

* * *

Death did not come for Minette that evening, nor the night that followed. Nor did sleep embrace her; she found herself ill at ease in the bed, half-convinced the sheets might twist and writhe in the night to suffocate her where she lay, so she curled instead beside it, the cool floorboards pressed against a face that she still struggled to recognise in the mirror. Her ear flat to the floor, she listened to the heartbeat of the castle, and found that the entire room seemed to shudder with the fear of what the morning might bring.

Every time she closed her eyes, the spectre of the rose-haired girl floated to the surface of her mind, disturbing in its serenity. The prince's voice might have been woven into her hair, so persistently did it invade her ears: _pointless pointless pointless._

He knew who she was. Did he know? He must. He knew their purpose. He knew her cause. He knew, and yet Minette still breathed, her heart still shook out beat after uncertain beat, her magic still kept her mask fastened into unyielding place, as though by iron shackles.

Where was Levi? Where was Oliver? Where was Yegor?

Minette was just one soul among thirty four, yet she doubted she had ever felt so lonely before. The room still felt a crypt; Minette felt herself a single step closer to a corpse.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you." It was long, cold hours before the light returned to the room and Minette knew that the morning had come. Mrtvola's crisp voice was very nearly welcome, though the cold quality of it struck Minette to the bone. "I wasn't certain if you would be awake."

"I am awake," Minette said softly, her voice burdened with wakefulness. She turned from the vanity to glance at the diminutive figure, glad that she had thought to add the final details to today's mask sooner rather than later. Venus' face bore no hallmarks of the shattered night Minette had spent on the floor – her skin was smooth and clear, her eyes bright and watchful, her hair aglow beneath the gold frets of the roof.

"Venus," Mrtvola said. Her hazel eyes fixed on Minette with an intensity that set the masked girl ill at ease indeed. Minette was unsure if the word required an answer, and offered none. In any case, after a long and still moment, the servant continued. "I was sent to fetch you. Breakfast begins in ten minutes."

Minette nodded. Whatever yesterday had been, this was the true beginning of the Selection – whatever form that took. She took small comfort indeed in the idea that she was hardly here to win; she knew she had to avoid elimination at all costs, until Yegor could put the next steps of the plan into motion. Eliminated girls were never seen again, and even Minette with all of her shyness couldn't quite bear that idea. She dug her nails into her palms, drawing up pale silver crescents where her skin was thinnest, and offered Mrtvola the faintest of polite smiles.

"I'll give you a moment to prepare," said the servant. "The dress in the closet. Don't take too long."

Word for word her instructions from yesterday. Minette wondered if she was reading from a script. The thought comforted her almost as much as it disturbed her – just as she was a player on the prince's stage, so too was Minette a puppet with Yegor at the strings. All these souls dancing around one another at the whims of a few powerful voices.

"Thank you," she said, though Mrtvola seemed ill concerned with politeness, so quickly did she turn on her heel and sweep from the room with an air something between imperious and impatient.

Minette did not approach the closet with the same reverence that had marked yesterday, although it still occurred to her that the handle should be made of bone, the wood painted with blood, _something_ to outwardly indicate the sheer dissonance of the entire place. The dress inside was not the one she had worn the day before, though she knew for a fact that no one had entered the room between her undressing and this moment; Minette held back a frisson of revulsion at the idea of the kind of voyeuristic magic the court might be able to employ to accomplish such a simple task as replacing a dress without her knowledge.

Today's dress was a deep navy blue, simple and modest in its shape, with a long skirt and a sweetheart neckline. Though it appeared quite plain on first glimpse, there must have been some witchcraft stitched into it; she found that where she touched it tiny white embroidery flowers bloomed and blossomed for the briefest of moments across the fabric, withering as she removed her hand. She liked it. She wasn't sure she should.

She studied her reflection in the mirror of the door to ensure that all was as it should be, and no threads had come unravelled during the night. She still could not tell precisely what time it was; the lack of a window disconcerted her, so far from the rest of the world did it seem to trap her. Not even the illusions painted onto the walls of a wide Zulu desert or a roiling whitewater river hemmed in by emerald hills could make her feel like less of a butterfly behind glass. There was something grotesque about the wearied falsity, the half-hearted attempt to render a semblance of freedom.

Minette dressed quickly – the cloth slipped through her fingers like flowing water, light and insubstantial, like something a ghost might deem too thin. Glancing in the mirror, she found that the dimensions of the face she wore were still strange to her, but no longer entirely foreign; she rarely wore the same mask for this length of time, and a small part of her mind whispered that it was like she had merely awoken from a long and convincing dream that she had ever looked otherwise.

"Venus Collins," she whispered. "I am Venus Collins."

She shut her eyes. Venus Collins. Selected. And yet – only a day into the façade and the prince seemed to know the truth better than she. And though the thought of the wolf of Bonita protecting her from the shadows calmed her heartbeat for the briefest of moments, her fickle pulse bounced back into a panic at the idea that, trapped in the den of the lion as she was, she was utterly ignorant as to the developments outside the palace. Her entire cohort of co-conspirators could be cold corpses cut and quartered in the castle courtyard at this very moment.

 _"_ _Every tedious stride I make will but remember me what a deal of world_ ," Minette said softly. She opened her eyes, and smoothed her skirts, admiring how the flowers flared beneath the gentlest of touches. " _I wander from the jewels that I love. Must I not serve a long apprenticehood to foreign passages_." She took a deep breath and turned towards the door as the handle rattled and Mrtvola appeared at the threshold. The rest of the quote was breathed in a rush, as though she exhaled with it all of her hopes, all of her fear, and all of her faith in the crow's crusade. " _And in the end, having my freedom, boast of nothing else but that I was a journeyman to grief_?"

It was like a prayer, and with the words spoken Minette followed Mrtvola from the room. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than Acacia, the dark-haired girl from the day before, appeared at her elbow with a bounce in her step and a smile on her lips. "Good morning, Miss Collins! Did you sleep well?" Trailing in her wake was her own gray, unhappy servant – Mrtvola's twin, right down to the strange intensity of her hazel eyes.

Minette straightened her back. _I wander from the jewels that I love_. "Oh," she said airily, adopting a facsimile of Andromeda's confidence as she waved a hand with Oliver's arrogance. "I could barely get a wink. The _excitement_ , you know."

Acacia flashed a sympathetic look. "I can relate." She squeezed Minette's arm. "Well, sleep or no sleep, you look _fantastic;_ and beauty lives with kindness."

Every corridor they walked through were clones of the last; Minette was not sure if Mrtvola was following them or they her, until at long the narrow hall in which they were walking opened onto a much larger foyer. They took a different path this time, moving away from the ballroom in which the royal viewing had been held in favour of ascending white stone steps towards an immensive banqueting space. Minette caught sight of the Fabulist she had glimpsed the day before, Kgetha, though she find she could not bear to hold the other girl's gaze for long; her skin itched if she looked at the burned girl for too long. Magic or mere instinct? Minette had little motivation to find out.

Acacia glanced at Minette as they entered, and smiled apologetically. "We have to sit according to our numbers," she said softly. "See you later."

Minette nodded, and trailed in Mrtvola's wake towards the end of the third table. She was the thirty fourth girl, and with one elimination, she held the very last number. She found herself beside a silent New Asian beauty and a pretty blonde with a bad shake in her hand as she attempted to pour tea for the girls around her. Fear was etched into every line of her face, and Minette found that she was glad all over again that she had a mask to hide her emotions.

Dangerous in a place like this to wear your heart on your sleeve.

She accepted a cup of tea from the nervous blonde girl, and stared at it for fear of looking elsewhere; though she trained her gaze on the surface of the dark liquid, she imagined she could still feel Kgetha's hawkish gaze still boring into the very marrow of her bones. She resisted the urge to tear her skin off; it was like spiders crawling across her skin, that gaze. _I am a journeyman to grief_. She imagined the strings of her heart were filled with lead, so heavy was her chest. Minette felt very alone.

And yet, even as she gazed at the teacup, the tiniest of butterflies, no larger than a mote of dust, peeled itself from the depth of the liquid and spiralled for a single moment, silken in shades of burnt sienna. It spun in the air, and descended to touch very lightly onto the nail of Minette's pinkie finger before the magic collapsed into mundanity and the shape shattered into shadow, leaving only the memory of its beauty.

* * *

Andromeda had not slept soundly in a year. Night brought only the memory of Demetrios' gurgling death-cry, and the knowledge that with every dawn that broke, she moved one day further away from him and from all of the safe harbour he had provided her over the years. No, Andromeda slept little these days; insomnia had clutched her mind, and seemed little inclined to relinquish her from its thorns at this late stage.

Her affliction, such that it was, had a few perks, and it was precisely her tendency to spend wakeful nights sharpening blades and casting dark glances around the room that meant Yegor was inclined to allow her the night watch. With Tyrell and Fallon out of the safe house, Kasha in the wind and Chastain trapped in the Selection, the space was unusually quiet, and Andromeda found that if she stilled her hand and held her breath, there was little to perceive except the soft breaths of the little girl, Charity, lost to dream in the next room over and the even softer consultations of Sweeney and Corbeau, filtering down from the roof muffled and incomprehensible. Andromeda did her best to ignore the tight hand of resentment that curled around her throat at the thought she was being so excluded from the pair's confabulations; she comforted herself with the knowledge that the Sweeney girl was little more than a tame hound at Corbeau's command. The boy knew better than to try and domesticate Andromeda in the same way.

And Sweeney was a girl, barely nineteen years old, nearly a decade Andromeda's junior. The older woman could scarcely imagine why Corbeau relied on so many so young, these children who still barely knew life and could hardly be experienced to treat death with much diplomacy. Oh, she was dedicated to the cause, to the matter of _killing the wretched king_ , but to Corbeau himself she held not even the tiniest smidge of loyalty, and she knew that her apathy was not popular among the pet crows the chessmaster had gathered around him.

She supposed when she remained stubbornly aloof from his machinations, it was harder for the others to justify their devotion to even themselves.

Achterkamp had faded early in the evening, vanished into the hum and roil of the street, and Andromeda idly wondered if she had seen the writing on the wall and jumped ship in Kasha's wake. She imagined the loss of the ghost would sabotage Corbeau's plans much more soundly than the fleeing of the arsonist's daughter; certainly she imagined they would rely on the little infiltrator to worm their way into the palace, although Corbeau seemed loath to let more than the bare minimum escape his lips. She hoped they would move sooner rather than later. The cogs were turning so very slowly in this strange war machine of Corbeau's that Andromeda half imagined things were standing still. Certainly he seemed to have spent more time covering his tracks than taking steps.

And at that thought, she heard Corbeau's steps approach - first his, faltering slightly, the click of his cane bolstering an unsteady gait, and then Sweeney's, lighter and quicker. They stepped down onto the balcony; Corbeau reached to help Sweeney down, his gloved hand at her waist. They were framed there for a moment as though illuminated in glavelight, the glow of the streets below casting them in strange shadows and painting them in odd neon shades of silver and red. Despite her wolfish moniker, the Sweeney girl had always reminded Andromeda more of a broken doll - her viridescent eyes had always had something wretched about them, her ivory skin making her appear somewhat ethereal and lost. She was beautiful, in the way that broken things often were, and, made otherworldly in the flickering argent light, Andromeda knew that there were many men and women who would kill to have Sweeney look them the way she looked now at Corbeau.

And for his part, for a single instant, Andromeda rather imagined there was something in Corbeau's eyes that approached reciprocation.

Though it did not, could not, last for long, and Andromeda herself broke the spell by dropping her boots to the floor and coughing loudly. She closed her hand around her spear, remembering how earlier in the day she had heard Demetrios' death-throes for a second time, brought forth by Sidonie's illusions - no, she corrected herself, Sidonie had brought forth only the shape of her brother.

It had been Andromeda who killed him this time, and left him choking on his own blood in agony as she sprinted onwards into the fray.

"Well?" She spoke sharply to dispel the cruel thoughts, her voice a muted crack like pearls falling across the frozen surface of a lake. "What genius have you two kindled?"

Corbeau's expression was marred with mirth. "There is little left to plan, Valour. Yesterday, I promised Oliver Tyrell three days; I intend to deliver."

"Am I to be left here babysitting, then?"

Sweeney's expression was inscrutable, but her eyes did not leave Andromeda. There was something hard about her tonight, something that suggested she might bite if Andromeda put her hand too close to her lips.

"No," Corbeau said mildly, but he did not elaborate further. He moved further into the kitchen, and rested a gloved hand on the back of the chair. "I know you crave blood, Andromeda. And I give you my word." A curl of the lips. "I fully intend you be sated before these two days are up."

* * *

 _Corbeau has his hooks in you now. He'll reel you back._

What a fool James had been. He had let the arsonist's daughter get close, and with her had come the spectre of the crow, and all the shadows she brought with her had nearly strangled him. He stood on the platform with his shoulders hunched against the chill of the evening, and rued the day he had ever caught sight of the scarred girl and wondered what names she might let him call her.

The world moved in black and white around him, shadows and suggestions of faces and hands, reaching and grasping, and the only real thing in the world was the hand on his elbow. As though shrouded in mist, figures faded back and forth, any semblance of clarity lost to him.

There was only a vague hum to suggest sound, and the _tick tick tick_ of the watch Cappie wore around her neck.

She released him with an abruptness that was almost violent; the intrusion of colour and sharp shape into his vision was almost rude. He had no time to adjust to the hard reality of concrete below him and stars above him before the train rushed into the station, bringing with it a wind that blew his hair and clothes into a tempest. The glow from the front carriages carried with it the sweet sound of laughter and easy living; from the back, two dark figures slipped from the balcony without need for Cappie's sorcery to become invisible.

James tried to keep his lip from curling. He didn't think he had ever met Fallon in the soldier's own right; he had always seemed an afterthought to Kasha, her shadow writ large in the bloodied garb of a killer. Without her venomous presence to soften him by comparison, there was something dangerous about the New Asian man, a feral quality matched only by his seeming exhaustion in its intensity. There were few things more dangerous than an animal; James thought an insomniac animal might just qualify.

His companion was a handsome fellow; James was comfortable enough in his own skin to admit as much. Dishevelled blonde hair and hooded blue eyes gave him a slightly rogueish quality, more small-time hustler than Fallon's serial-killer-in-his-spare-time. Malevolence didn't cling to his clothes the same way Fallon's did.

"Gentlemen," James said languidly, giving both of them a sardonic wave. "Nice of you to join us."

The rogue glanced briefly at Cappie, and then shrugged. "What can I say. We travel in luxury."

Cappie jabbed an elbow into James' ribs with a quick, fiery glance. He was almost taken aback by the casual way she did it, as though they were lifelong friends. " _The deep of night is crept upon our talk_ ," she began, but was interrupted by the wolf of Bonita before she could force many words out.

" _And Nature must obey necessity_." His voice was husky and wearied, like he had spent the train journey swallowing matches. Were there quicker ways to thaw a heart?

"I think we know well enough by now to dispense with the cloak-and-dagger rigmarole, don't you?" the rogue commented mildly.

Cappie shrugged. "You think Minette's the only one who can craft masks?

James did not think he imagined the slightly pained look on Fallon's face at the mention of the unfamiliar name.

"What an awfully unnerving thought," the rogue said, to no one in particular. "Thanks for the trust issues, love."

"If you didn't have them before," Cappie said, her voice tinged with mirth. "I imagine I'm doing you a favour."

Fallon shook his head, and looked at James, but said nothing. James met his eyes as though in a challenge - after all, it was the arsonist who was meant to have the basilisk's gaze. There was little to fear from the soldier, especially on a day they were ostensibly on the same side.

The rogue broke the silence. "Lawson, I presume," he said. "Do you have the, ah..." He cast about, rather theatrically, as though the very stone might be eavesdropping upon them, as though the weeds in the railway tracks listened closely. "The _assets_?"

"We wouldn't be here if I didn't." James reached for his bag, but his motion was stymied when Cappie held out her hands.

"Unless you two intend to give the whole railway station a show, boys, I suggest we adjourn to a more private location so you can change." She looked at Fallon and the rogue with sympathetic eyes. "And may I propose we get something to eat? I don't know about Levi and Oliver, but when _I'm_ attempting the impossible in infiltrating a totally impenetrable palace and carrying out the most daring murder the world has ever known while retrieving the two agents we have on the inside... I like to have a full stomach."

* * *

 **A note: Minette's portion of the story takes place one day after the other sections. I realise the timeline may be difficult to follow, but I wanted to check in with as many characters as possible due to my long absence. I apologise if there has been a dip in quality; the next chapter will be published much sooner, and will hopefully be a return to form.  
**

 **I just want to apologise for my long absence! It's been nearly a year since this fanfic was updated, and I totally understand if people have lost interest in the story and the characters. I just want to say that if anyone is still invested, I'd really appreciate a review telling me what you thought. I love the world and team, so I intend to finish this story no matter what!**


	12. Chapter 12

_Dying  
Is an art, like everything else.  
I do it exceptionally well.  
_ _I do it so it feels like hell.  
I do it so it feels real.  
_ ****\- Sylvia Plath****

* * *

... _frisch weht der wind der heimat zu mein krähenmädchen_

What was he thinking of?

She had done it again.

One year in every ten

She managed it—

What was that noise?

The wind under the door.

What was that noise now?

Ash, ash—

He poked and stirred.

... _gde ty?_

Flesh, bone, there was nothing there—

She never knew what he was thinking.

What was the wind doing?

Nothing again nothing.

Think. Think. Think.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

Dry bones can harm no one.

The prince had said

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

... _adelaide caro adelaide sei perso_

* * *

Yegor's dreams were rarely coherent, and dreams about Jaana never were.

This night had been worse than most.

He saw crowned men with jewels for eyes, dark-haired women with gaping wounds on their faces bleeding golden moths into the clear grey air, little girls with snakes wrapped around their waists, their arms, their throats. Silhouettes moved to embrace and lost their heads, crumpling into ash that was pulled skyward by a hiemal wind; pale porcelain figures turned on strings of thin glass, reaching with hands encased in silver; crows tore their way from the mouths of every person dream-Yegor passed, their claws scoring deep crimson lines into lips, their wings pressing against hollow eyes, feathers spilling.

And in the centre of it all, a girl with dark hair drowning, wolf-eyes wide.

He did not believe that arising from such dreams could hardly be called awakening, for Yegor could not deny that he had left a large part of himself stranded in those dreams, among those crows and those lost girls.

So Yegor did not _awake_ , but he did _return_ , and in returning he felt the vulnerability of sleep lift from his eyes and his limbs even as he turned slowly on the futon and glanced lazily over at the desk to find that scarcely an hour had passed. The sun was still low, painting market stalls cluttering the beaches burnt sienna and drowning the horizon in umber tones of dying embers; the stars were still veiled and reluctant, as though waiting for a cue to take the places that had been chosen for them. The lights on the street had flickered into life in anticipation of the coming dark; from the window, Yegor could see that someone was in the kitchen; pale light spilled across the balcony, a shadow moving across it, a strange façade of domesticity. He could not deny that he had grown rather fond of this odd rickety house almost despite himself, in all of its phantasmic hush and cramped secrecy.

But _fondness_ , detached and strained as it was, would have to sit aside. The plan was all. When he and Taja crossed this threshold tomorrow, it would be for the final time – and there would be no looking back. There was no point carelessly stranding bits of yourself here and there when you lived the life of a revolutionary. If Kasha was still about, Yegor would have let her and her matches loose on the verdigris building and all of its strange beauty. If there was one thing Yegor detested, it was the idea of putting down roots.

And yet, even as he rose reluctantly and wandered languorously to the window, the smallest part of Yegor Corbeau, the part that was the least Yegor, the part that was less Corbeau than the rest, wanted to pretend that something so simple as _staying_ was a feasible option – or at least, for a moment, indulge the idea that he might want it to be. Here, lost in the tangled back alleys of a Honduraguan bowery, somewhere girls like Taja and monsters like Yegor could wear masks day and night and not draw the eye. Here, in a little ramshackle house on the edge of the roil and the revels, with a stack of books and a pile of papers and a bundle of notes to busy the mind and the hand, and maybe the rebels could fade just as Cappie did and allow mere boys and girls to step into their worn boots to walk a path and live a life free of bones and smoke and lies.

Warped floorboards creaking underfoot, amber fireflies floating lazily in cliques about the cracked window, laughter rising in muffled bouquets from the street below, the pervasive scent of old parchment and lily-of-the-valley and warm golden light spilling almost carelessly from candles strewn about the cramped space – it could not but remind Yegor of earlier, less revolutionary days, of those long ago hours he had spent in dusty attics and old libraries, of that ancient time before he had known what being a Corbeau meant, before he fully understood the word _xisuthros_ , before he had begun to lay the foundation of the crow's crusade.

Those memories were distant, and they twisted and dissipated like mist grasped in bare fingers even as Yegor's thoughts moved in their direction, but the strange sensation of hiraeth could not be eluded. In the quiet of the dusk, the strangest kind of nostalgia flourished without roots. And yet, Yegor knew it was liminal. It could not, would not, last beyond this single, fleeting moment. Even as he turned towards the clothes he had laid out on the desk, and caught sight of his sinews and his scars in the dark surface of the window, he knew that he would rather tear out his own veins by the handful rather than sway from his path against the false king.

Besides, he thought wryly as he shrugged on his shirt, in whatever sleepy dwam after sleep had aroused this asininity, he had failed to adequately account for the fact that holding onto this moment – holding onto this odd diegesis that had formed within the sparse perimeter of an ersatz haven – would mean maintaining around him all of these wolves and ghosts and liars and killers. Revolutionary bed-fellows typically did not domestic roommates make. Yegor could pull their strings, force their hands, push them down these paths, but once the king was in the ground and the dynasty had fallen, he would be happy to leave them behind and cast forward alone.

Although it occurred to him as he fastened his cuff-links that when he thought _alone_ it was with the silent oxymoronic suffix _-with-Taja_.

After all, what was a general without his lieutenant?

He cast a critical eye over himself in the mirror and cocked an eyebrow. He was dressed, as he was always dressed, flawlessly, with the formal, decorous mien of a man who intended someday to be king. Old-fashioned black braces over a starched white shirt that had either been tailored or stolen, so expensive the fabric. His cane hung on the back of the chair.

He looked like his brother. He knew he looked like his brother. He looked like a _Corbeau._

And secure in this knowledge, Yegor adjusted his collar and went out into the kitchen, where Taja was cutting meat with a mutinous expression on her face. Her pale arms were bare, and bleeding; long scratches ran perpendicular to her veins, given no particular shape, crafted to no particular pattern. Drops of red spackled the tabletop, but Taja's green eyes dared him to say a word about it as she glanced up to catch sight of him in the doorway.

Yegor did not, as it turned out, say a word about it.

"Time to go, Taja, darling," he said instead, turning his head slightly to look at little Charity Martinez, who was sitting on the edge of a wooden chair in the corner of the room with a book open on her lap. Oliver had bought it for her, haggled for it over a market stall groaning with the weight of all sorts of trite trinkets, and he had presented it to Charity without much ceremony before he and Levi had taken to the night. It was an old book, Yegor thought, about playing cards and magic and tyrants. The pages shone with bright colour. Strange of Oliver Tyrell to be sentimental.

Taja's voice was low. "Right now?"

A bad day. She had them, sometimes, though _sometimes_ seemed to be becoming _often_. Like a veil was being drawn down on the girl Yegor had grown to know and almost like, the impulsive girl who knew the name of every herb they passed on the road, the empathetic archer who had never heard a bad joke she didn't love, the only person who didn't believe making Yegor smile was a lost cause. On days like these, she fell so deep into her memories and her misery that Yegor wondered each time if she would manage to surface again or if she would drown, full-clothed, in unshed tears.

She never drowned. Taja Sweeney was as strong as she was stubborn, and that was _very_.

It was the first word that had come to his mind the first time he had thought of her, standing in the ruins of the cabin she had shared with her family, and looking at the strewn corpses of her family, who had been abandoned where they lay. Her father, the butcher, her mother, the apothecary, her two little brothers… but not the girl herself, the famed Sweeney daughter, the Rapunzel whose story had reached Yegor's general many miles away, and one of the rebels with Yegor had turned to him and said, "she'll be dead as well" and Yegor had only shook his head and a voice in the back of his mind whispered, _she's stronger than that_.

He hadn't known then how right he was.

He had realised it quickly enough, of course.

He met Taja's gaze and nodded. "Right now."

It was as close as Yegor could come to an apology.

* * *

the air was still around her as night fell about her the cold penetrating deep into her bones but for all she seemed to acknowledge it gaëlle sidonie might have been a statue carved from the most indefectible of marble as she stood as though in uffish thought her teal eyes staring staring staring her thin lips parted as though eternally on the verge of speaking if anyone around her was inclined to notice they might have asked her if she was alright if anyone around her was inclined to know her they might have known the answer was almost always _no no no_.

 _(birds all a-song footsteps crunching wind in the grass her own heartbeat heartbeat heart beatheartbeat thump thump thump who would not recognise such a simple sound)_

but she was silent as the clouds split to permit the final rays of sunshine to leak into the atmosphere and dye crimson the softly moving grasses and gently rustling leaves of the estate's garden gaëlle made the first movement she had made in perhaps an hour and took a single simple step and then a second and then a third and now she was walking up the long sloping driveway to the collins home her dirty blonde hair lank around her pale face she paused and raised a slender hand and curled her thin fingers to gesture the men and women assembled around her to follow in her wake as though with each step she took on the gravel drive a yellow brick bloomed from the heel of her shoe.

( _very soft breaths servants speaking softly the hinge craved oil a grandfather clock lost and plaintive in the bowels of the house tick tick tick tick tick tick tickticktickticktick)_

her followers fanned out behind her she hadn't paid much attention to their faces to their features they might have been utterly featureless for all she cared for all she had noticed these followers too were lost in thought much like gaëlle herself though these thoughts in which they were mired were not their own gaëlle knew too well the feeling of having your skull cracked open and seeds planted within it seeds which birthed thorns thorns which choked and strangled any coherent thought or cognizance that threatened to flourish in her mind now that she was walking her eyes moved though to the outsider it would have seemed she found no material thing upon which to fix her gaze her thin lips twitched into a mirthless smile and the blue-green of her eyes seemed to shine a little brighter.

( _or was that a heart under the floorboards that ticked such, screaming agony in lieu of justice for the bloody butchery made of it)_

and now gaëlle thought she had followed well her steps into the house but now she found herself in the kitchen and could not quite understand how or when she had found her way here did not recall the steps she had taken to this point was utterly unable to recount the faces she had passed and the minds into which she had reached her talons to curl tightly around their hopes and dreams and fears and losses to weave nightmares out of the air imperceptible to all but those they tormented.

( _shadows writhed just out of sight in the edges of her eyeline they could have been innocent shapes domesticated rabbits twitching as though in the thralls of torture)_

gaëlle's bones still ached her blood still lay ill at ease in her veins she knew that by rights she should have died on that day shackled to the carriage when the wolf of bonita stood over her with a knife in his hand and buried steel in her sternum and drew iron across her throat and watched her and waited for her to die by rights she should have she wondered why she hadn't wouldn't it have made more sense if she had wouldn't she be happier if she had wouldn't it save some many lives if she had.

 _(footsteps upstairs footsteps in the hall kettle shrieked crockery clattered soft words spoken softly knife on plate knife on glass knife on bone)_

the shackles on her wrists were gold and studded with the most beautiful rubies amethysts emeralds sapphire diamonds bright shining jewels she had no name for and oh they made her hands heavy but oh she knew wearing blood was heavier still and it was with that knowledge that she raised her heavy hands here now and wove the air into a tableau of horror painted blood on the walls with the panache of a true artist and tore apart the furnishings with a creative ferocity that made her wonder whether she was recreating a scene she had glimpsed as a child or perhaps in some forgotten dream she couldn't deny she savoured the idea that in creating the illusion of a massacre she could incite her followers into atrocities in the belief of justice.

( _apemios collins was a good man a kind man a good father a kind father these days his sort was few and fewer couldn't survive long in this kind of world with that kind of heart)_

now the servants of the collins family swarmed forth eyes blank faces blank tongues heavy in their heads fear as chains around their limbs nothing to do nothing to see except the horrors gaëlle crafted right before them various in their shapes creative in their number of teeth and talons now they descended on the collins family before they even had a chance to rise from their dining table now they fixed their hands and began to tear the anger borne of panic was unbearable the violence an indefatigable force apemios collins didn't even have time to call for help although if he had gaëlle knew he would not be able to rouse any help from the servants the guards the other members of his family for they were all lost in trances without hope of surfacing and before he could run they had broken his legs and he fell beneath their hands though to gaëlle's irritation he denied her the pleasure of a scream only set his jaw as the people he trusted and loved tore him to shreds

( _someone had lit a fire smoke rose flames crackled floor underfoot blazed stone cracked windows swelled glass burst the grandfather clock kept ticking ticktickticktickticktick)_

gaëlle stood over the bodies of the collins family they were she thought barely recognisable as men and women and children now and even as she stood the servants turned on one another leave no evidence leave no evidence leave no evidence she knew the prince calau heir to the dynasty had wanted her to bring soldiers with her men of war but who needed protection from those whose minds were not even their own hadn't she walked straight into this estate and captured every servant and met no resistance met none of the crows where were the crows where were the crows where

were the

crows

 _(tickticktickticktickti)_

and gaëlle understood

the gin had been baited

the trap had been sprung.

oh yegor was a clever one when he wanted to be.

the flames behind gaëlle parted and now the beastly beauty andromeda sprang forward with a spear in her hand and hatred in her eyes.

* * *

Cappie and James had stolen these clothes from a man much taller than Oliver himself, and to his irritation the rogue found himself rolling the cuffs of the shirt up three or four times just to allow him to move his hands freely. And yet, despite the irritation, Oliver knew he would look comfortable in another man's clothes. It was business as usual for a liar like him, even if tying the ugly white cravat took him more tries than he was willing to admit. He managed well enough, and a quick glance in the window confirmed that the illusion, if not perfect, was at least complete.

And yet, he was nervous. Was he nervous? There was a cold hand of apprehension tightening around his heart, but Oliver could not call it nervousness. It was _excitement_ , maybe, or _anticipation_. This was the end-game now. Five years ago, he had come to this country as a naïve young boy, grieving and angry, his entire life packed into a single small trunk and his heart worn on his sleeve. He had promised his sister justice. He did not indeed to break his promise. And yet, Oliver could not deny that a part of him had begun to doubt Yegor in his long days and weeks observing the palace and the Selected girls agonising within. A part of him had feared the revolutionary fire would flicker and fade, and then he would be left alone again in his apartment full of plans with no path to vengeance except to cut his way into the palace person by person, and yes, meet his end if he must.

No need for that now, he supposed. Yegor's methods were complicated to be sure, but perhaps a little more guaranteed to succeed. He couldn't say he was comfortable in the garb of a teratoid aristocrat, but Oliver was more than willing to put up with a little discomfort if it meant seeing blood.

Cappie and James had broken into an old library to put the final touches on the plans, the air heavy with dust, the light speckled and mottled where it filtered through ancient stained-glass window. As he pulled the short fur cloak into its place over his shoulder, Oliver stepped out from behind the shelf and caught sight of Levi, looking similarly comfortable in a gaudy tailored waistcoat and a short dinner jacket made of a fabric in a shade of pink that was more than vaguely garish. Oliver supposed the soldier would typically have gutted anyone who suggested he dress in such a fashion, but Levi Fallon was a consummate professional. He inclined his head towards Oliver, his expression ambivalent. "Shall we?" The motion sent light rippling across the ring he still wore on a chain around his neck, resting gently in the hollow of his throat, the one imperfection in his otherwise flawless transformation from wolf to grandee.

"I suppose we shall."

Cappie was sitting cross-legged on an upturned shelf, leafing lazily through an abandoned dog-eared tome of human anatomy. She shot Oliver a sly smile as she saw him. "That's a good look for you," she said wryly, gesturing to the red coat and fur cape James and Cappie had pilfered from the unconscious form of an Illean optimate. They had, Oliver was grateful to see, kept it rather bloodless; only the black collar of the shirt showed a few dark stains, and that was rather easily hidden with a creative turn of the fabric. Certainly it was far from the least comfortable thing the Britannian man had ever worn, and despite Cappie's pointed words, very far indeed from the least attractive he had ever looked.

James was leaning against the wall, observing the blood and broken skin on his hands and rather pointedly not looking at Levi, so it was left to Oliver to say, "everyone knows their places?"

"We're not amateurs," Cappie said lightly, turning another page. "Relax, Tyrell. All'll be well." She shot a look at the three men, and cocked an eyebrow. "Have a little faith."

"A pound of flesh for all," Levi remarked, his voice low.

James smirked. "Provided you all keep your shit together."

Oliver's expression mirrored his, though there was, perhaps, a little more derision in his lips. "I'm fairly sure we'll manage comfortably."

Cappie nodded and shut the book decisively. She tossed it to the side, and hopped down from the shelf, interlinking her fingers and stretching her arms theatrically in front of her. Standing in the shadows of the high vaulted ceiling of the library, each of the men around her about a head taller, Oliver thought there was something very delicate about her. Cappie was small and somehow perpetually seemed smaller, as though each time she faded from this world she came back somewhat incomplete, having lost something intangible between whatever was _here_ and wherever _there_ was. Her blonde hair fell in wild curlicues about her face; despite her casual manner, her heart-shaped face was etched deeply with tiredness, the skin around her cobalt eyes scarred with perse shadows. She looked as though she hadn't slept or eaten in days; Oliver wondered just how ragged Yegor was running her, forcing her to evanesce like this. It almost seemed as though the colour was being slowly and permanently drained from her, leaving her anemic and achromatic.

He almost regretted asking her to become a ghost again now.

"Well, boys," Cappie said cockily. She extended her hands to Levi and Oliver, tilting her head so that light and shadow played Picasso on the hollows and planes of her pale, pinched face. "Shall we fade?"

Oliver restrained a smile. There was, he thought, something infectious about the girl's daring demeanour. She was difficult to dislike. He thought it strange someone so bright could disappear into nothing so easily. He thought Adelaide might have seemed a little like this if life hadn't eroded the ebullience of her youth into cynicism and worldly-weary dubiety.

"I suppose we shall," he said again, pulling one hand from his pocket to link pinkies with the smiling not-quite-ghost. Her hand was bare, her fingernails uneven and speckled with chipped pastel polish in revolutionary colours, a rich reddish purple approximating the deep visceral hue of hypostasis.

Levi's expression did not change, but he did move towards Cappie to touch her sleeve very lightly. The last words Oliver heard him utter before the world faded, colour by colour, were, "I hope you're wearing your dancing shoes, Tyrell."

* * *

The poison gardens of the false king were beautiful. Crimson had known they would be so, of course, but she had not realized that they would be perhaps one of the most perfect sights she had ever had the fortune to glimpse.

Flowers grew higher than the tallest of men, and lazily dripped petals in the most gorgeous jewel tones of flame-of-burnt-brandy and drunk-tank-pink, falu and gingerline, amaranth and kelly. Plants leaned together, as though to share whispered secrets, their leaves tangled so closely and tightly around one another that no light escaped from the neighbouring avenue, isolating Crimson within the single tight path of blossoms upon which she found herself. Even underfoot, the tiniest little flowers sprouted and grew, the most pygmy of camellia and verbena, tansy and heliotrope, zinnia and peony. So many aposematic venoms, Crimson thought, so many poisonous things desperate to declare their nature. If only the whole world played by the same rules.

Here in one of the clearings, there existed a gargantuan tree, old, its canopies dripping star-shaped leaves. Gold, green, tipped in stark white. It was heavy with a crop of yasakmeyve fruits on the cusp of maturity and independence from the bough. Crimson had seen many such trees on her travels, but never one of such sheer size; they didn't grow just anywhere, resisted every vain attempt at concerted cultivation. Only at the liminal edges did they flourish, where another, more ethereal world hovered and seeped into city, black loam making sludge of asphalt, green radiance splattering traffic signs and sidewalks. Where birds flew too close to that border they disappeared, the dirt-crusted pigeons and smoke-stained crows. To create and cultivate it here, in the caged opulence of the palace, was nothing less than a miracle.

Accordingly there were no birds here or butterflies, no ants or amphibians. All was clean. Not a blade of grass was too long; no weeds or infestation of fungi touched the earth, no mark of worm or insect hunger on petals. Crimson rather felt as though she might be the only living, breathing, moving thing in the entire world. Not even the wind stirred the leaves. As she walked down the path, she paused at intervals to listen for other footsteps, for anything overhead, for a single hint she was not entirely alone in the universe in this moment. Even her extraordinary senses revealed nothing. Around the trees, frangipani, lotuses—either the king favored those, or no other flower would grow. Symbols of passing on and peace, respectively. Cruelly ironic, perhaps.

Myth and legend told that yasakmeyve fruits were alluring and sweetly scented. Reality was less glamorous. Their scent was faintly vegetal rather than like palm sugar, jasmines, or some heavenly blossom. On the ground one of them lay fallen and premature, ivory skin bruised from impact and seeping blue sap. Crimson stooped and turned it in her palm, tracing the contours of a pareidolic face in the bruised surface - rough, a work in progress, but there was already a nose and mouth defined, eye sockets deepening. The ones on the bough were shaped similarly. All yasakmeyve fruits from the same tree looked alike, replicated over and over in some internal mold, the way dolls emerge as identical strangers from a factory.

The branches dripped with paper folded into delicate origami shapes, stars and snowflakes hanging from every bough like cherry blossoms. Crimson stepped forward and plucked one - out of curiosity or malice, she could not quite say. Unfolding it revealed a splintered fragment of a recipe… or was it a broken snippet of poetry? She could not imagine the false king inclined to sentiment regarding either.

" _For the crimson flower of our life is eaten by the cankerworm of truth_ ," a voice said behind her, intoning in deep baritone, and Crimson tightened her fingers around the paper and turned to meet the gaze of the false king, the immortal tyrant. " _A_ _nd no hand can gather up the fallen withered petals of the rose of youth_." He was not an old man: with pale white-blonde hair and a long, leonine face, he was a strangely perfect facsimile of a beautiful man, cold and strangely bloodless in that perfection. "Good evening, your ladyship. How does the day find you?" His pale eyes met Crimson's, but there was no smile in it. His eyes may as well have been crafted from steel and iron, so much warmth did they display.

How did the day find her? Lost. Angry. Forsaken. Crimson paused for what seemed an interminably long moment, twisting the pale paper flower between her bejewelled hands into a tortured convulsion of smeared ink and scattered words. Perhaps it had been poetry after all. She could not say that she had ever imagined the false king to have even a passing interest in the more ethereal and beautiful elements of this world – true beauty, not this sterile perfection. At last, she spoke. " _Yet I am not sorry that I loved you -ah! what else had I a boy to do?_ "

" _For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the silent-footed years pursue_." The false king moved further into the clearing and tilted his head. "I did not take you for a connoisseur of the arts, Lady."

Crimson looked down at her shoes and tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. It was all she could do to keep herself from lunging forward and fixing her hands about his throat; she was so close to the tyrant that she should have been able to hear his heartbeat. She hoped the shaking in her fingers could be interpreted as fear rather than the restrained urge for violence. "Oh," she said, and forced herself to remember that she was not, in this moment, truly Crimson Martinez. She had another name, another role, another purpose. "I wouldn't quite say _that_ , your…. Your Highness."

"No? Well." The king moved around her as a predator might move around prey. "Then you feign fluency with aplomb." His eyes did not move from her for a single instant. "Although I confess - _though youth is gone in_ _wasted days,_ _I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's crown of bays_." I rather fancied myself a poet in my youth," the false king continued mildly. "I cannot say whether my prose was competent, but what can I say. It was a hobby." He reached out a long-fingered hand to touch the poison flowers as he passed. "Her royal highness prefers gardening, I think."

"I…" Crimson set her jaw. Power radiated from this man like something palpable pouring from his pores. It was enough to turn her tongue to lead, to fill her bones with iron, make her blood jump as though spiders were dancing in her veins.

"I don't suppose you've ever heard the story of Mithridates." The king's voice brooked no questions. Crimson interlaced and twisted her fingers. "A paranoiac king. He saw conspiracies in his own shadow, heard assassins in his own footsteps, tasted venom in every morsel of food." He plucked a single blossom, and crushed it between his fingers, staining his fingers red and yellow. "So he took poison. The tiniest bit, day by day. A mere drop." He turned his hand over, as though admiring the way the acid ate away at his skin, leaving tiny curlicues of smoke drifting into the air. "Building a tolerance. A _resistance_. Now, when the conspiracy was crafted and the assassins came and the food was tainted… what happened, do you think?"

"I…" No, she thought, something darker than _power_. Yegor seemed powerful. This man – if she could truly call him a man - seemed like a force of unnature.

"They simply used a different poison." The false king shrugged. "I am told he died in agony."

"I…" Her words were lost; she could not force the consonants from her lips, the vowels from her tongue. Her teeth chattered as though she were standing in a snowstorm; her skin crawled like she had been scorched.

The king raised a hand, his lip curling in a cruel approximation of a half-smile, and Crimson shut her mouth. "I will leave you to your walk, your ladyship. I do hope you are finding the Selection to be an… _interesting_ process." He did not smile. His movements were fluid but restrained, as though performed by rote. "My son likes to take his time… but the hourglass runs without restraint. The deadline approaches.

Crimson's hands were fists now, utterly crushing the poetry in her hand.

"Best of luck, your ladyship." The false king moved around her, still utterly silent but for his words. Crimson did not pretend to know why the king so obviously did not use her name; the thought occurred to her that he knew it was a false alias, designed to obfuscate her true purpose. "Enjoy the ball tonight, won't you?"

And he was gone before she could reply.

Crimson's hand relaxed, letting the piece of paper flutter gently to the ground. She exhaled for a very long moment, a breath she hadn't fully realised she had trapped behind her ribs, and set her shaking hands to smoothing down her skirts.

So _that_ … that was Xisuthros.

She did not move for a long moment, for fear of encountering him on one of the paths that snaked through the poison gardens, but at last she moved forward and plucked another paper flower from the yasakmeyve tree – its colour, she noticed, was minutely different from the rest. Unfolding it, she found Yegor's characteristic handwriting, written in the tight scrawl of haste:

" _I hope you remember how to waltz_. _"_

* * *

Minette was more glad than she could fully articulate to see that Acacia had saved her a seat in the parlor. By the time she descended from her room, her movements stiff with tiredness and her dress blossoming into tiny white embroidered bouquets, the room was quietly busy with human activity; the other Selected girls did not seem so interested in idle chatter, but busied themselves in quiet tasks that kept their hands busy and their minds from the situation in which they found themselves. Only Acacia, beautiful fool that she was, seemed alive with some kind of delight; she bounced in her seat slightly to wave Minette over. "Venus!" she called lightly, her skirts swaying with her movement, changing colour like the sea. "Over here, lovely."

The room reminded Minette of an aviary, all these girls in beautiful rich jewel colors flitting about in captivity, their distress subsumed, their unease palpable but unspoken. They gathered in tight little groups here or there, and cast distrustful glances at one another and at their own reflections, their gaze flitting for fear of meeting the eyes of another. They were lit only by artificial sources, dim oil-lamps affixed to the wall throwing rich white-yellow light across the pallid faces of the beautiful girls below; the windows here, as in Minette's room, did not look out onto the world but onto the intricate and almost convincing lie of a quaint mountain town, the kind you might find in the Tuscan mountains, all tight cobblestone alleys and ivy-strangled stone walls and rivers running downhill. Something about it reminded Minette of home – not the little home by the ocean that she had shared with her father the politician, and her mother the Fabulist, an eon ago, before… _everything_. No, it reminded her of a home she had never seen, a home that had never been, the abstract sense of a lost place of her past to which she could never return and yet the strange impression of a future that she had yet to craft.

Minette did not look at the window for long.

Instead, she slipped through the chairs to perch on the edge of the loveseat Acacia had indicated, hoping desperately that her absence had not been noted. Glancing up at the room through her eyelashes, she noticed in surprise that she had been followed through the door by Kgetha, the tall dark-haired girl with the fiery eyes. But, Minette noticed, on this instance, Kgetha did not seem quite as hardened and fierce as she had appeared that morning at breakfast; her hands shook, ever so slightly. Acacia must have noticed the direction of Minette's gaze, for she leaned closer and breathed, ever so softly, "I heard she had a date with the prince today." To Minette's surprise, she perceived that Acacia, despite her floral name, wore no scent; unlike the other Selected girls, who wore dizzying quantities of perfume, Acacia seemed to have no perceptible fragrance. "In the gardens."

"Oh," Minette said faintly, because that was the only word that came to mind, so suddenly and so abruptly was she filled with sympathy for the other girl. Even the scarce few moments she had spent in his company in the rose-girl's crypt beneath the palace had been enough to give her long sleepless nights and a tight knot in her throat whenever she thought of him. She flicked her gaze in Kgetha's direction, but was otherwise silent for a long moment as Acacia relaxed back into her seat and turned to whisper to the girl beside her.

Kgetha's face had paled; she looked as though she had aged a hundred years in the past two hours.

Minette had never been so enormously glad to wear a mask.

"Oh!" Acacia leaned forward again; her pale, delicate hand rested very lightly on Minette's shoulder, as though the dark-haired girl feared she might react violently to the physical contact. "Did you hear?" She flashed a smile, broad and sweet, and Minette wondered how on earth a girl so clearly in the jaws of a monster could appear so entirely and so delightedly oblivious. "There's going to be a _ball_. Isn't that just _joyous_?" She patted the shoulder of Minette's dress gingerly, turning to the girl next to her as she spoke. "Galdua said she'd do our hair, but I was wondering, Venus, if you'd help us with our makeup?"

Galdua was a small brown-skinned girl with chestnut hair bound into an intricate braid along the base of her skull, looking nervous and twisted her hands in her lap. She had a pale white scar running the line of her cheekbone, very faint, as though she had put a knife to her face like a Fabulist but had lacked the heart to go through with the butchery. It was the barest sliver of a wound, almost like a strange mockery of Kasha's mutilation, of her mother's own scarring. Minette didn't like the faintest sense of derision that rose in her stomach, the thoughts that stirred in the corner of her mind that Galdua hadn't quite been strong enough to do what had to be done.

It wasn't a part of herself that she liked.

It was a part of her that sounded a lot like Yegor.

"Your makeup?" Minette said at last. If there was one thing for which she was enormously grateful, it was that Venus Collins was so quiet and so diffident that Minette's hesitation, her unmastered spycraft, her incomplete lies, were not easily discernible. In this Selection, she imagined everyone measured their words, considered their truths and untruths with caution, said or did nothing without delay.

"You always look so _perfect_ ," Acacia said, her voice sweet as jam, and Minette did not have the heart to explain that perfection was a product of her glamour – that her lips were not truly so rich and red, her skin so smooth, her features so crisply defined and expertly shadowed. Beauty was easy to achieve with a mask, Minette thought, and restrained a smile at the idea of showing Acacia the burned iron mask that was her _before_ to this beautiful _after._ "You _must_ show us… provided you're not afraid to help out the competition a little." She fluttered a wink in Minette's direction.

"That's so sweet," Minette said softly. "Of course, I'd be happy to help you guys."

Galdua offered her a slightly watery smile. Where her nails had dug into her palms, little red crescents rose on the skin. Minette wondered how long she had been in the Selection. She wondered how long she would last from here on out. "Thank you, Lady Collins."

Minette raised a hand as though to wave away the praise. "Glad I can help," she said, and tried a smile.

Acacia leaned in close again, and it did not escape Minette's notice that her gaze was fixed firmly in Kgetha's direction. "Apparently there's going to be all sort of distinguished guests. Aristocrats, plutocrats, oligarchs and tycoons… you know. _Backup plans_."

Her nonchalance was almost contagious, and for a moment Minette wondered what kind of a world and what kind of a Selection Acacia believed herself to be participating in if she thought going home in a runner's up position was, or ever had been, an option.

"Backup plans," she echoed, and was rewarded with another one of Acacia's beauteous smiles.

It wasn't hard to see why she was in the Selection with a smile like that. Not even a scar like Kasha's would have saved her.

* * *

Blood.

Blood, blossoming into tiny flowers on James' shirt. Little curlicues of crimson spreading into florets. Red, Cappie thought dazedly. Lots and lots of red. And it was red that returned to her vision first, all the red in the world shining visceral and violent: the blood on James' shirt, the paint on her nails, the bricks on the walls beside her. Red returned first, but the return of colour did little for Cappie, because she could see now that the girl who had shot James was grey, grey, grey – her skin, her clothes, her eyes. Only her lips, parted slightly with concentration, shone scarlet.

Blue returned next for Cappie, but she struggled to keep the colour at bay, to push it away and force herself into fading again – but what good would it do? She had been a ghost. James had been a ghost. But the grey girl had sniped him nonetheless, had made it look casual, pinned the young rebel like a butterfly behind glass. James had dropped her hand, staggered back with a hand to his heart where the arrow had pierced deep, and the grey girl was moving forward now, and Cappie pushed back the colour as fiercely as she could, tried to drown the world in grey, held up her hands to watch them fade. And yet the grey girl's eyes followed her, even as the world was painted over in charcoal.

Crimson had called the grey girl _Mrtvola,_ the living corpse. It was a good name, Cappie thought, for a girl so grey.

"Achterkamp," James breathed. Cappie could only be grateful that they had been caught _now_ , after Levi and Oliver had slipped into the palace unnoticed. The wolf and the rogue were gone, disappearing into the crowds that had assembled for the ball, and Cappie and James had been on the way out, retracing their steps back through the avenues towards the old library. Even Cappie's ghostliness was not enough to get her into the palace; that was to be left for Oliver's natural charm and magnetism. And yet, even though they had only lingered at the edge of the property… this grey girl must have seen them, even faded as they had been, and followed them, and caught them here, in a dark street, the kind that usually felt safe for Cappie the invisible girl.

She was panicking. She knew she was panicking. Panicking, because James' blood was on the wrong side of her skin, and because the grey girl's eyes were fixed on her even as the entire world faded, and because she knew that if she fell, here and now, there were very few people that would mourn, and even fewer that would mourn for long. At best, Yegor would send out Kasha and her gasoline to burn both of the bodies so that questions weren't asked.

Both of the bodies?

The grey girl's bow rose, and the arrow flashed, rippling like so much molten silver.

Both?

Cappie reached for her knives.

If she was going down, she thought determinedly, there was going to be _three_ bodies to burn.

" _Achterkamp_." James' body was wracked in pain, his voice a tight maelstrom of pain. It was not a plea, but a warning, and yet Cappie only tightened her hands over her blades and moved forward as quickly and violently as she could muster the energy to do. She was still a ghost, she told herself. She was still as quick and as silent as one.

If she was a ghost, let her be a ghost.

And yet, the grey girl's arrows found her anyway.

The first arrow tore through her throat. Cappie thought she would have gasped if she had the breath to do so.

It was okay, she thought. Levi and Oliver had made it into the palace. Maybe their blades, unlike her own, would find purchase. And if theirs did not, then Crimson and Minette would follow them; and after that would come Andromeda and Taja, Yegor, Kasha if she must. And after their little crusade would and could come others – the ranks of the rebels could not be numbered, and Cappie knew, thought, _hoped_ that they would not stop, would never stop.

Revolution was not something you could kill.

The second arrow hit her just above the heart, just as her knees hit the ground.

James didn't seem to be capable of speaking intelligibly at the moment, his chest heaving, saying only a single name again and again, _Annabelle_ , he said, _Annabelle_. It sounded like a prayer. Cappie wondered whose name she should be whispering. If she was angled towards the good place, she thought she should ask for her mother, for her father. Again the image came to her – a sky of cornflower, her father spinning her in his arms, her mother looking on with a smile that radiated love. She had still been Diantha then. She had yet to fade.

This, Cappie thought, was a good image to die with.

The third arrow hit her in the gut.

The memory faded, and Cappie was left again in this little dirty alley, maybe the only street that was little or dirty in this city. One hand to her throat and one hand to her heart, and she raised her head to meet the grey girl's eyes with hatred in her gaze.

"Annabelle," James said quietly, and then again, "Achterkamp."

Cappie's stare did not stir from the archer. She could not speak, but the grey girl seemed to understand.

"The king sends his regards," the grey girl said softly. Her voice was flute, the tone behind it crisp and cold, a thing of beauty detached from its source, snowflakes in a grey sky.

"Long live the king," Cappie wanted to say, that usual mocking salutation of the crows, but before the words had even completely filled her mind, the grey girl had notched another fletched arrow and fired it straight into the ghost's face.

For the final time, all her breath evaporating in her lungs, her bones shuddering, all of the colour bled from the world, and the girl who had been called Cappie faded.

* * *

Andromeda lunged with the spear and the wraith that was Gaëlle Sidonie shattered into a thousand glass fragments and every fragment burst into ash and there was nothing left, an empty room but for the corpses of the Collins family lying broken and bleeding on the floor. She spun on her heel and spun the spear in her hand and spun her eyes about the room, and found nothing upon which to pin her gaze, nothing, for a very long moment. She paused, and a braid of fire flicked about her face as she narrowed her eyes and fired glances back and forth, searching for some fault-line in the illusion.

Yegor had been very clear with his instructions: kill the illusionist. The Corbeau boy was playing an elaborate game of chess with thieves and killers as his pawns, and for his strategy to have any hope of succeeding, certain opposing pieces had to be removed from the board.

Gaëlle Sidonie could not be permitted to survive the night.

And for that reason, Yegor had let the Collins family unprotected and vulnerable, and for that reason Mara Morasova had tracked Gaëlle Sidonie from the moment her entourage crossed the Honduraguan border, and for that reason Andromeda had held back from the shackled illusionist, waiting for her to exhaust herself enchanting the servants of the household. Andromeda could not deny the slight swell of self-satisfaction that rose under her ribs at the thought that Yegor trusted her to have the heart – or the lack thereof – for the task. Certainly the bleeding-heart Taja would not have had the iron strength of will to stand back and watch the bewitched servants tear Apemios and his wife into shreds. Certainly the good-natured Cappie would not have been callous enough to allow the Collins family to be used as bait. Certainly the delicate Minette would not have the resolve to eviscerate the illusionist, as Andromeda planned to do now.

She didn't intend to let Yegor down now. And yet she could perceive _nothing_.

Nothing, for a long moment, and then the walls began to shudder and come across as though separating at seams. Not coming apart, Andromeda realised with an unpleasant sinking sensation in her stomach, but opening – the wall was composed of eyes, eyes stacked upon eyes stacked upon eyes, all of them flicking open now slowly in a long, languid sequence, hundreds of grey eyes gazing at her from the walls, just staring and staring and staring. There was only the slightest light behind those eyes, only the smallest hint of life, like sunshine glowing behind clouds on a sunny day.

Andromeda recognised those eyes.

They were Demetrios' eyes.

Her brother's.

Staring, staring, staring.

Something flashed behind her, and she spun, and found she was too slow to defend herself against the foxes that coalesced forth from the air to leap at her, to snap and snarl. She swung her spear in a tight arc that spoke of long mastery, but found that the weapon merely collapsed into mist and fog against the fur of the monstrous beasts and left her hands empty and her entire body defenceless, and where the foxes hit her they burned and scorched her skin and her hair.

Andromeda had forgotten what burning felt like. She had not burned for years, not since she was a child, not since her parents had been burned in front of her and her brother had waded through cinders to pull her from the pyre. Andromeda and the fire were old friends; she had learned not to fear its embrace. And _yet_. Where these foxes (not real, she told herself, they aren't real, they can't be real) touched her, they burst into flames and the fire caught and clung to her and every single one of her nerve endings seemed to be ablaze with agony and the terror of sensation.

Her hair was aflame, and yet so intense was the pain she could not quite enjoy this particular bit of poetic irony.

Cool air came flooding back and she reeled backwards, tightening her hand over her spear, gasping to find the fire doused. Gaëlle Sidonie stood in front of her, shackled hands held upwards, fingers moving as though conducting an invisible orchestra, but her eyes were faraway – very faraway indeed. Andromeda propped herself up on her knee, taking deep breaths of cool air, and tightened her hand on her spear, but found that the wood was rotting beneath her hand, splintering and blistering where she touched it, faltering into nothing.

She swore under her breath, and Gaëlle narrowed her eyes, and Andromeda swore again, for what use was she without her spear?

…no, that wasn't right, she was Andromeda Valour, she was a soldier of the highest order…

What need had she for her spear, anyway? Andromeda's mind reeled. She couldn't quite remember. She thought the smoke might have driven every coherent idea from her mind, so difficult was it to fix upon concrete truth. She couldn't remember why she had come here.

…no that wasn't right, she had come here to kill her, to kill the illusionist standing before her…

She needed her spear, Andromeda knew. She felt unsafe without it – oh, she knew she could fight well enough. But she had to defend Demetrios. All of her life, her older brother had been her stalwart, her guardian and her mentor. Wasn't it time she paid him back?

After so long without him, it was an enormous relief to see Demetrios standing in front of her, gold shackles on his wrists.

"Brother," Andromeda said softly, and Demetrios' silhouette rippled for a moment before her, his face splitting into a smile, one of the smiles with which he would reward her as a child when she managed to kill her first buck, when her spear flew true, when she managed to flip him in a sparring match. It was pride and it was viciousness and it was totally, purely Demetrios. "Brother."

"Andie," Demetrios said, his voice reverberating. "I've been waiting for you."

Andromeda stood. "Waiting?"

Demetrios tilted his hand, and his smile faded slightly. "It's time to go hunting, little sister."

* * *

Taja hadn't realised quite how much she had missed Lysander and Roman, or how much she had appreciated having a hollow replacement for their company, until she and Yegor were walking away from the old Seguro household, leaving the little Martinez girl behind in the reluctant custody of Nithya Lilavati. The pixie-haired girl did not mention the deaths – the _murders_ – of Aaron Hale and his men, although Taja knew that it must have been pressing on her mind. Lilavati only took tiny Charity by the hand and looked at Taja with apprehension in her eyes; the wolf-girl could not but exactly what kind of threat Yegor had unleashed on the young medic to impress upon her the importance of keeping Charity Martinez very safe and very secret. It didn't surprise her that Nithya was in the habit of regarding her suspiciously. Taja didn't blame her. Beautiful girls, such as Taja was, were always regarded with abject chariness around the time of the Selection, as the world and its mother tried to discern exactly which devil they had dealt with to avoid being chosen.

Well, Taja stood beside hers.

She did not ask Yegor with what ultimatum he had negotiated the terms with Nithya, but kept his company in silence as they walked towards the old Hale warehouses in which they had concealed the body of Adelaide Tyrell. In the dim light of the evening, Yegor's sharp face was all mercury-and-silver, his grey, grey eyes and his dark, dark hair conspiring to render him a vague phantom with a faraway gaze. Taja knew when Yegor was lost in plots and plans, and she also knew when to leave him to his thoughts. She could not entirely deny that his distraction gave her an opportunity to study the pale angles of his face, the sharp corners of his bones, the tight angles of his eyes. He looked tired, she thought. He looked very tired. The collar of his coat was speckled with dust; his hands were stained with ink.

The docks of Honduragua were arranged in a tangled writhe of shipping containers and tight avenues between decrepit abandoned garnerhouses, a tableau that might have been grim if not for the bright colours of the doors and gates on every building. The streets wound around the warehouses, doubled back upon themselves, spanned little bridges over murky polluted water in which Taja imagined she could see bodies floating. Historically, each quay and harbour belonged to a particular merchant family; Taja couldn't say she knew what a prestigious family name might feel like, though she imagined Yegor couldn't quite say the same.

Being a Sweeney was an entire world away from being a Corbeau.

Sometimes she thought Yegor forgot she had heartstrings of her own, a reason of her own to fight, a private vendetta against the king. She could see it on his face, clear as day, when he thought she wasn't looking. He thought she followed him like a dog, moved only out of loyalty, desired blood because he asked it of her.

Yegor was wrong about very few things, but he was wrong about this.

This quay had belonged to the Lester family, once upon a time, but it had been Aaron Hale's antecedents who had owned the warehouse Yegor and Taja now approached. She took a deep breath of harbour air as they walked – salt-tinged and seaweed-scented. Taja had grown up in a forest; she had never glimpsed the ocean until she found herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She didn't think this would ever get old – looking right across the flat water at the distant line of the horizon, seeing the whole world laid out unfolded in front of her.

No sign of rebellion here; an imperial flag, pale yellow like an immature sun, hung ragged and un-moving from the roof, bleached at the corners from long age and neglect. The steel door was rusted, the stone wall eroded, the path leading to the entrance overgrown with grass… it did not, Taja had to admit, look like very much. Better to hide in plain sight like this, she thought. There was a heavy iron chain on the door, the kind she thought you might find attached to an anchor, and a complicated lock affixed to it that she suspected would take her more than a few seconds to pick.

Of course, there were simpler solutions. Yegor, Taja noticed now, had brought a crowbar - she shouldn't have expected anything else. He offered it to her, the corner of his mouth lifting in a charming smile. "My lady," he said softly and Taja could only roll her eyes and try not to laugh out loud as she took it from him. The steel edges were sharp, the iron hinges were strong, but Yegor's smile was sharper and Taja was stronger and soon the door was pried half-open to allow a narrow entrance and the two revolutionaries slipped into the warehouse as silent as ghosts.

As Yegor moved to the west-facing wall to light a lamp by which they could work, Taja moved over to the worktable and pulled away the old, stained paint-sheet that obscured the prone form of Adelaide Tyrell's corpse. It was as perfect and unchanged as it had been that day they pulled the carcass from the depths of its royal grave, lacking even a single indication of decomposition, of rot, of natural processes; she couldn't deny that it was unnerving to see something so totally and irreparably detached from ordinary materiality. Taja could not help but stare at the still, dead face of Adelaide and search for a likeness with Oliver, some link between brother and sister, something that would transform a mere hollowed shell into a real girl with dreams and hopes and fears who had been lost to the cruel machinery and machinations of a tyrant.

In times gone by, she wouldn't have had to try so hard to care.

The room was bathed in rich amber light; Yegor moved to join Taja by the workbench, his eyes skating across Adelaide's hair as though he expected to find some clues tangled there. He set his jaw as though he were about to speak, and then paused and turned his head to glance at the stairs at the far end of the cavernous space, according Taja a clear view of his throat where the skin was thinnest, a pale vein keeping time with the always-steady tick-tick of his pulse. The steps led to what had probably once been the office of a foreman or cartographer; a dark shape, tall and thin, moved within.

Yegor said, "He's a theatrical one."

Taja bit back a smile. She should have guessed the devil would be a hypocrite.

The iron stairs clanged loudly with every step despite Taja's attempts to remain quiet. For one of the first and only times in their long, strange partnership, she took, and was permitted to take, the lead; Yegor trailed in her wake, almost reluctant, though Taja wasn't sure if she had imagined the half-smile on his face at her verve. When she glanced over her shoulder to take in his expression, she was unsurprised to see that he was again lost in thought, his brow furrowed as though he was attempting to prepare to rationalise every step and every decision he had made over the past ten years.

It was so strange to see Yegor impuissant.

She knocked on the door to the office, a rapid tappa-tappa-tappa that belied her slightly wolfishe energy, but she nonetheless pushed open the rotting wooden door without waiting for a response. The entire room had been thoroughly ransacked, as though overturned by main force in an overwhelming typhoon. The man had his black boots propped up on the overturned desk and his hands interlaced behind his head, his grey eyes faintly amused at nothing in particular. He was tall and thin, wearing the kind of waistcoat you could hide a gun in; the gold and silver and white coat of a Selection watchman hung on the back of his chair. Mourning colours. They shone, despite the dim light.

"Evening, Iliya," Taja said. Any other day she might have been a little more reticent, more withdrawn - but she was still shaking off the last clinging vestiges of her bad day, and Yegor was tired, so tired, and really, what was the tiniest bit of disrespect to a man of such quiet leverage when they were in this late stage of the endgame and so very close to killing the king. "How goes the quiet watch?" It did not escape her notice that the man's lips twitched in a slight smirk, even as his eyes flashed with a hint of annoyance.

"It goes," Iliya Corbeau replied. "How goes the crow's crusade?"

"It goes," Taja replied.

Iliya's mouth curled into an actual smile; it was strange to see such a sweet expression on someone who looked so much like Yegor. "Ah, well."

Yegor had followed her silently into the room, and exchanged only the slightest nod with Illiya before he reclined against the wall and folded her arms. "Were you in such a hurry to leave your post?"

"The cold doesn't suit me," Iliya replied with a shrug. "And now you have four rebels within the Selection. I felt… _redundant_."

A ghost of a smile from Yegor. "Unnecessary?"

"One might say."

Iliya stood. It always surprised Taja how similar the two men were; seeing them in the same room was like gazing at mirror images. Yegor was slightly shorter, Illiya slightly more world-worn, but they both were unmistakeably, undeniably, undoubtedly Corbeaus.

"You're sure you can trust Fallon?" Iliya said softly. His voice was raspier than Yegor's, still slightly tinged with the accent of their youth where Yegor had shed it entirely.

"He hasn't given me a reason to doubt." Yegor arched an eyebrow masterfully. "I imagine some fraternal wisdom is imminent?"

Iliya angled his body to implicitly include Taja in the conversation, a gesture for which she was quietly and deeply grateful. Yegor was the youngest of the Corbeau brothers, and yet known for often appearing the more intense; Taja had often found that his older siblings appeared more affable in their ruthlessness, more sugared in their speech, more open in their deceit. Yegor never hesitated when he lied, but he held his cards much closer to his chest. He held his cards very close to his chest now, his expression utterly unchanging as Iliya said, "they've got the crooked girl."

"Kasha," Taja said softly, and Iliya nodded. Yegor's eyes were very dark and very focused. The air seemed entirely still, without even the faintest aspiration of air.

"The arsonist's daughter is spitting her venom," Iliya said, his voice bored. "And the queen is parched enough to drink it." The brothers exchanged dark looks. "I hope you didn't tell her any secrets?"

Yegor's eyes glimmered in the faint light. "You think she will tell them anything?"

"No _will_ about it. You're exposed, little crow. If your men aren't dead right now, it's only because the king wants to have his fun with them first."

Taja saw now that Yegor was smiling his typical diabolic half-smile, the curve of it akin to a wickedly sharp sickle.

"Yegor," she said softly. "Is this part of the plan?"

He looked at her with those devil's eyes and she almost bit her tongue for having asked the question.

"What do you take me for," Yegor replied. "A fool?"

* * *

The queen spoke with a thousand voices, splintering, her eyes haunted.

 _"The prince gets into your head. Devours your thoughts, spews nightmare into the spaces left behind."_

 _"But the queen. The queen will rip your heart out."_

Kasha did not need to be broken. She was a coward; she would have told them anything to save her own skin.

The queen ripped her heart out anyway.

* * *

 **Long chapter this time... consider it an apology for the long hiatus! I would really appreciate hearing any thoughts, theories and/or criticism that you guys might have, especially regarding the characters and the plot. As you can see, this is the chapter in which things really start moving, so I'm very excited to show you all what happens next.**


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